An old fly reincarnated

I was looking through my fly boxes yesterday when i stumbled across the very first fly I tied, i took it out to fish after i had tied it and had a fair few takes on it but missed them all!

The fly compromised of various flash fibres that i basically tied to get rid of them as they had come in a cheap set. I started off with a white fibre body then added a load of peacock flash to the belly, a small hint of blue flash on the flanks leading up to brown and black flash across the back. To finish off i gave it a red throat and some gold eyes. It really was very basic but Ive always liked it for whatever reason so unlike allot of older flies Ive never butchered it to recycle the hook. I never actually use it because it was tied on a rubbish hook and i put that down to all the missed takes.

I still had a load of those flash fibres so thought I'd try and re-create it but on a better hook and improve it slightly hopefully. The hook choice was a Tiemco TMC 600SP lethally sharp and a butch looking hook!
The finished fly is below, i think if i tie another i will add less blue flash fibres as I'm not so keen on that addition where as the original just had a couple of strands tied in.

So today i went back to that same venue to try that fly out again and hopefully hit any takes this time round. The fly after a swim....

I'd had a couple of slow follows off small pike but nothing was really having a go at the fly like the first time id tried it. Then as i was running the fly down the near side margin thinking a pike might be tucked under the vegetation, out came a head and sucked it in. At first i thought it was just a decent jack, but every so often it would shake its head and id get a good view of it flaring its gills, its amazing how big there heads look when they do that. I still wasn't thinking this fish was any more than a jack even when i netted it, which i had to do to reach over the margin. I got a bit of a surprise when i lent over the marginal weed to lift the fish and it felt very heavy. It was a strange fish really, quite stunted length wise but with a big head and tails fins, it was also fat and very wide. despite it not looking so it would have gone mid double which was a really good result and i was happy with that, my old fly pattern had done its job!

And this is what it looks like after a pike has chewed on it.....