Chernobyl Ant

Two slabs of foam, four rubber legs and a sighter. It looks like nothing alive, and trout on a windy lake shore eat it like a hopper.

What it is

The Chernobyl Ant was born on the tailwaters of Utah in the early 1990s as a joke that caught fish, and it has never stopped catching them. It is not an ant. It is a foam-bodied slab with rubber legs that suggests any large terrestrial that has landed badly: a grasshopper, a beetle, a cicada. The Chubby Chernobyl, which adds a dubbed body and a white poly wing, is the version most Australian anglers now carry, and it is the one drawn on this page.

It turns up in the fly lists for the Snowy Mountains lakes and rivers in sizes 8 to 14, and in an account of a windy day on a highland lake shore when the waves gave away the olive shapes of cruising browns and the fly that took them was a Chernobyl or a lake hopper. One angler recorded fish eating a Chernobyl in September, well before hopper season. The fly does not need the naturals to be about. It needs a fish that is looking up and a bank with cover on it.

Anatomy

From the bend forward: a body of two layers of closed-cell foam, a dark colour under and a lighter or brighter colour on top, tied down in two or three segments so the foam bulges between them. A dubbed underbody on the Chubby version, usually a bright or peacock-coloured dubbing showing between the segments. Two pairs of round rubber legs, one at each tie-down point, splayed out to the sides. A sighter or wing of white polypropylene yarn or foam on top, which is what you see; the fish sees the foam slab and the legs.

Key features

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It is very hard to sink. Foam floats without dressing and after any number of fish. That is why it is the top fly of a heavy dry-dropper rig when a hackled dry would drown.

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The segments. Foam pinched into two or three lobes gives a hopper’s body the way a fish sees it from below, a fat silhouette with legs trailing.

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The legs. Rubber legs move in wind and on a twitched drift, and on a wave-tossed lake shore they make the fly look alive without you doing anything.

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Colour is a choice, not a rule. Tan and yellow for hopper season, black for beetle falls, olive on a lake in summer. Carry two.

Typical materials

Part

Typical material

Hook

Dry-fly hook, 2X long, size 8 to 14

Thread

6/0 or 140 denier, matching the underbody

Body

Two layers of 2 mm closed-cell foam, dark under and tan, yellow or olive over

Underbody

Peacock or bright synthetic dubbing (Chubby variant)

Legs

Round rubber or Sili legs, two pairs

Wing

White polypropylene yarn or a strip of white foam

In Australian hands

On the Tasmanian lakes it earns its place as a change-up and a suspender. A size ten orange-and-black Chernobyl hybrid, a metre above a parachute dun or on its own, takes Western Lakes browns that are refusing the standard dun and spinner patterns; on Lake Echo a chubby rubber-legged beetle variant turns a fish that is refusing a smaller offering on the same froth line; and at Great Lake it works in rough water with a small gum beetle on a dropper, awkward to cast and worth it. In the Kimberley it is one of a mixed box of foam and fur flies that stands in for a dedicated sooty grunter pattern.

Fishing it

The Chernobyl is at its best on a lake shore in a wind. Walk the bank the breeze is blowing onto, where the terrestrials are being carried, and cast the fly into the wave line a few metres out. Let it sit. Twitch it. Let it sit again. On a bright day with a bit of chop the fish will find it before you find them. On a creek, fish it tight against a grassy or timbered bank where a hopper or a beetle would fall in, and give it the same plop and twitch you would give a Parachute PMX.

When nothing is looking up, it is the best indicator fly in the box. Hang a tungsten nymph on sixty to ninety centimetres of tippet beneath a size 10 and it will hold that nymph in fast water all day. Watch the wing; when it stops or ducks, lift.

Change to a proper Hopper when the fish are eating real grasshoppers and refuse the foam, and to a small black beetle or a Red Tag when they are on a beetle fall and the Chernobyl is too big. See beetles and ants for what a beetle fall looks like.