360 TUBE FLY SPINNERS: Something Old and New - Tony Amato

September 10, 2026

For some years now 360 trolling for salmon has been hot—not just hot—but on fire! And having the right terminal gear for the situation is also key.

James Moore’s productive selection of 360 tube fly spinners he tied along with his hand painted blades and leaders he put together before the trip.

If you have never trolled with a 360 salmon flasher let me describe it in as few words as possible. The flasher itself is essentially an old school 11-inch dodger with a flat fin/rudder placed close to the rear. The addition of the fin forces the dodger shape to spin in a full-circle as you troll it behind a 6- to 20-ounce lead ball. Thus, you have 360 trolling. For whatever reason, and there probably many, it attracts salmon like crazy. And I’m sure most of you reading this are already using the technique. But, once you have your 360 flasher and your preferred leader distances for Spring and Fall salmon fishing what are you using down by the hook? Most agree that you want something light that can be “thrown around” easily by the 360 flasher. And a terminal rig that is nearly weightless in the water is best for letting the 360 flasher give it life by not adding excessive pull/drag on the 360 flasher while making rotations.

My last two trips out I was with Adam Hocking (Steel Dreams Guide Service) and my son-in-law James Moore (Moore Fishing). Just prior to both of these trips James mentioned to me on the phone some guy was using “tube flies.” I knew exactly what he was talking about. I thought “wow” how cool is that, it’s got to be the ultimate end game for a super-light and flashy rig behind a 360 flasher. Just add your favorite hook setup and spinner blade to top it off. The beauty of a tube fly is that the tube slides up your line and doesn’t get destroyed by the fish while you’re fighting it. When I jumped into Adam’s boat he had a “fly” type spinner rig but no tube. He was tying Krystal Flash into the treble hook snell knot and sliding rubber tubing over it. Similar action but with no tube—but a “fly” just the same. If you are wondering how well tube flies work James laid it out like this:

“We already caught several fish with a tube fly on one particular rod in my boat. So I unhooked it and put it on a rod that was dead all day and “bingo” that rod hooked into our next fish.”

Fly fisherman really fell in love with tube flies and took them to the steroid level—probably for two reasons. 1. They are light to cast. 2. The materials don’t get destroyed by the fish as it fights. The tube just slides upon your line away from the teeth. Which is especially good for catching toothy ocean fish.

Adam Hocking’s 360 spinner with Krystal Flash.

James Moore’s tube fly spinner in action.

Before my hair turned grey we published Tube Flies Two by Mark Mandell and Bob Kenly. It’s mostly about fly fishing with tube flies, but the history is pretty amazing and informative. I encourage you to read on and enjoy. Maybe it’s time for you to start tying 360 tube flies.

The following is an excerpt from the book: Tube Flies Two Evolution

Tube Flies: A Murky History

Today, tube flies can be found in the fly boxes of most salmon, steelhead, and saltwater anglers around the world. Despite the widespread acceptance of the tube-fly concept, its early history is poorly understood. To give you a picture of its possible origins and evolution, John Alevras has assembled the following excerpts from both celebrated and obscure angling writers and historians he uncovered in his 700-title fishing library.

Author Thomas Clegg, in Modern Tube Fly Making (a self-published pamphlet 1965), states that tube flies “probably came to Britain from America, where anglers got the idea from North American Indians who used hollow bird-bone lures which emitted a string of bubbles.” Although this proposition may be plausible, Clegg presents no evidence to support it.

The first published mention of the tube fly appears to be in The Angler and the Thread Line (1932) by British writer Alexander Wanless. In the tube concept, Wanless saw a solution to the loss of what he considered an unacceptable number of fly-hooked salmon. Along with several photos of fish caught on tube patterns he writes: “The lure… has a hole through the centre of it so that it slips up the line when a fish is being played. That is to prevent the small hook from being levered out of the fish’s mouth by the body of the fly.” He tied the standard patterns of the time—“mixed wing and palmered body fully dressed”—on lead tubes (See Chapter 32: Alec Smith).

Although the photos and writings of Wanless suggest the tube concept originated in the British Isles in the early 1930’s, two highly respected angler/Historians, the late Joe Bates in his Streamers and Bucktails (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979) and Andrew Herd in his The Fly (The Medlar Press, 2001), have credited Ms. Winnie Morawski with the invention of the fly on a tube. A fly tier for the firm of Charles Playfair & Co. of Aberdeen, Scotland, Ms. Morawski began tying her flies on sections of hollow turkey quills around 1945. There is no evidence that she was aware of the work of Wanless. Her tube-fly patterns were the first in northern Scotland and the first to be sold commercially.

Lindsey Moore caught this chrome bright coho salmon with a tube fly that James tied just days before the trip.

In Successful Modern Salmon Flies (1989), Peter Mackenzie Philips says the use of treble hooks for salmon fishing in Britain was started by John Parker, who began producing his Parker tube flies in 1947, about the same time Richard Waddington’s first book Salmon Fishing: A New Philosophy was published. Author Philips speculates that Parker’s tube flies didn’t catch on because their long, hair wings and shaggy appearance were “less attractive to human eyes” than the slender Waddington shanks. According to Philips, “Parker used starling wing quills, and other bird quills to form tubes on which to dress flies and a mount of wire running through the quill with a treble on the end, rather like a Devon Minnow (See Chapter 8: David Croft) mount.” To add extra weight for high-water fishing, Parker wound lead wire around the mount.

Neil Graesser writes in The Finer Points of Flyfishing for Salmon (The Boydell Press, 1989) that. the Parker tube files “with heavily leaded, spinner type mounts and lighter, smaller (plastic) tubes” be-came available almost immediately after the appearance of Waddington shanks. Graesser says these first tubes were often tied “more like a bottle brush than a fly which would have masked any body as the hair wing completely encircled the tube. They looked like nothing on earth, but did kill fish all the same.” Evidently, the lack of a hook holder on these flies caused the treble to foul repeatedly on the cast. According to Graesser, the most popular of the Parker heavy spinner-type flies were the standard pattens of the day: Garry Dog, Hairy Mary, Shrimp, and Akroyd.

Although Thomas Clegg does not attempt to identify the inventor of the tube fly in his 1965 publication, he provides a rationale for its appearance in post-war Britain economy. Hooks and exotic feathers were in very short supply at the time. “When a fish was hooked,” Clegg writes, “the free tube, containing all the important feathers, slid up the cast (leader). Fish teeth had less chance to fray and disrupt the dressing, as often happened with standard flies. Broken treble hooks were easily replaced for a few pence, whereas a salmon hook casualty meant scrapping the whole fly.” Clegg goes on to cite the many functional shortcomings of these early tube flies. Leaders frayed against rough metal edges, unaligned or fouled trebles caused missed strikes, and water poured through too large tube bores. In slack water he says that the hooks pulled the leader down, so the tube fly fished at one level and the treble at anoth er, somewhere beneath it.

Clegg credits the late Fred Hill, bailiff on the Strathalan Castle water of the river Earn in Perthshire, with two critical developments in tube fly history in the 1950s: the invention of the “Stoat’s Tail” fly and the use of very small diameter, hard plastic tubing. Apparently Mr. Hill clipped a small ermine (stoat) tail from a necklace belonging to his wife, then tied it around a piece of tubing taken from an empty ball-point pen. When he attached a tiny treble hook, his creation caught salmon and sea trout in quantity. Hill’s Stoat’s Tail became a classic low, summer-water salmon fly on Scottish rivers.

Herb Burris hooked into this Fall Chinook on one of the darker colored tube flies.

According to Clegg, subsequent advancements in tube design by engineers, model makers and professional fly dressers were a direct result of the “unique efficiency of the Stoat’s Tail.” Gone were the bird quills. Plastic lining was added to aluminum and brass tubes to prevent leaders from fraying. Lined metal tubes allowed any depth or flow of water to be fished, with or without quick-sinking lines. When duplicate dressed tubes are added to the leader, Clegg writes, the fly’s overall size ran be increased, making “larger meat-hook salmon flies” no longer necessary. He restates a belief, widely held at the time, that tube files are most productive in summer low-water conditions. He recommends summer flies be dressed on “molded plastic tubes, beveled at the ends to prevent the dressing slipping off and with a cavity at one end to accommodate and align the treble.”

While all this was happening in Britain, the only published evidence of early tube-fly evolution in the U.S. appears in Bill Blade’s Fishing Flies and Fly-tying (Stackpole, 1951). In this book Blade showcases tube-fly patterns he developed for hoppers, nymphs, crawfish, hellgrammites and minnows and states: “this method is not new; it has been used on feathered jigs for many years” and “possibilities are great.’’ Blade provides no description of the construction. of these “feathered jigs” or information about their history. Unfortunately, his tube patterns did not catch on with anglers and fly tiers in the States.

In Tube Flies (Frank Amato Publications, 1995) Mark Mandell and Les Johnson filled in some of the gaps in the history of tube flies in the Pacific Northwest. In the late 1940’s, Lloyd Peters of Port Angeles, Washington commercially tied bucktails on high-pressure plastic tubing which were used from Alaska to California by salmon fishers. Twenty years later, John Gort, also of Port Angeles, supplied trailers and sportfishers with his own tube bucktails, some as small as three inches long. In the 1970’s, around the time the Washington State Department of Fisheries began releasing hatchery silver salmon into south Puget Sound, innovative tiers Joe Butorac, Garry Sandstrom, Dave Wands, Brian Steel, and Bruce Ferguson began producing tube flies intended solely for fly cast ing to these fish.

In 1959 an article in Trout and Salmon magazine stated: “Tube flies are perhaps the most important advance which has occurred in Atlantic salmon fly-fishing since Woods introduced the grease line method.” Forty-five years later, the advance, largely unheralded, is still unfolding.

Todd Shreve, Nick Amato and Troy Bloom with tube fly caught salmon.

A small sampling of tube fly styles shown in the book Tube Flies Two Evolution.

Editors Note: You can get lots of tube fly ideas by purchasing Tube Flies Two Evolution in softbound or hardbound on our AmatoBooks.com website.