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Zonkers imitate baitfish as well as any other fly ever created, use common materials and are easy to tie

This is an impressionistic streamer, tied to match the schooling sardines being eaten by baby tarpon. It has fooled many fish

The Fair Fly is in many ways a perfect zonker: large, very fishy looking, simple to tie. It's a very good sculpin imitation and an excellent large streamer.

Inspired by Kim Sorensen's salmon fly the Munker I set out to make a sea trout variant for the salt

Too much about airplane food... and too little about fly tying and fly fishing. An ancient pattern from the Illustrated Pattern Swap year 2000.

This article features a handful of zonker patterns, which we cover in connection with our thorough theme on tying zonker flies and cutting or buying zonker strips.

I have always been annoyed by most commercially available zonker strips. Most of them are far too large and long haired for my use. 90% of all available strips are cut from rabbit, and in most cases they are both too wide in the skin and too long haired for anything but larger flies.

This is an update to one of the first patterns ever featured on the Global FlyFisher. The old article about this fly is from 1996, and has been on the site with its scanned B/W pictures ever since.

Zonkers are great looking flies with a lot of volume and motion, and the zonker style lends itself well to many types of small fish and worm imitations.

Rubber legs and a zonker... in orange. The Ronker is a fly for deep dwelling trout, featuring some weight bright colors, mobile materials and not least rubber legs.

For many saltwater anglers the term "worm hatch" has a magical ring to it. When the worms spawn, the fish usually go berserk, be it trout, stripers or tarpon. As one writer puts it: It's like yelling "free lunch" to a high school football team.

This fly is a bright and tasty looking bite of feathers and fur that can sometimes be the key to luring a big trout. It's a variation of a variation of the Bloody Butcher.

The Mickey Finn is one of the first streamers many beginning fly tyers learn to tie. Kasper Muehlbach never used it and for years a yellow and orange fly was missing in his fly box. Last year he was inspired to tie a replacement.

Minnow, sand eel, fry. This little fly will imitate most small, transparent fish. Based on a now-classical Danish sea trout fly with an added zonker strip, there is little new under the sun. But it does catch fish as pictures in the article will show you.

Shiny tubing materials are widely used as body material on streamers. So is ordinary tinsel. Here is a new way of making glittering, but more volumnious, pulsating and living bodies for your streamers using Angel Hair or a similar material.

Two tails are better than one says Mark Dysinger, who is an avid pike angler. In this, his latest pattern, he has created a large and very lively fly for the mossy green predator of the lakes. And it can tempt a bass too...

This fly is called Twospotted Fairfly. The two spots in the name comes from the bait, which it is supposed to imitate: the twospotted goby. Gobies are a common kind of fish in the shallow parts of almost all bodies of water.

Mark Dysinger presents a pair of pike flies that can take a beating - the Prince of pike and the Poxy Bunny. Large, durable and easy to tie as pike flies should be. Mark has used them extensively for his own Northern pike fishing

Yep! It's yet another one of that Danish madman's muddlers. This time with an even longer name: The Short Heavy Chicago-Zürich-Copenhagen Delayed Nutria Tube Muddler or SHCZCDNTM for easier remembering!

A tube fly is different - a muddler is me - a tube muddler is a perfect choice. Tube muddlers are not unknown to me. I have tied and fished a few in my time, and I like them... so do the fish by the way.

A conehead muddler/zonker

This is a steelhead pattern, normally made with black or purple rabbit. But with natural rabbit it makes a very good pattern for the coast. By cutting a narrower strip of rabbit and choosing natural colors a lighter dressing is achieved. Good for spring fishing and fishing in current like over reefs.

This fly is a larger and more imitative variation of the Squirrel Zonker. The addition of the eyes and the heavy hair hackle makes the fly more fishlike and the Fair Fly is a good imitation of a sculpin.

A large colorful fly for cod fishing.

A bottom seeking fly for pike, bass, cod, pike perch, sea trout - even bonefish and many other fish.

I used to hate zonkers; those pre cut rabbit strips were like hell to tie with: too thick skin, too long hair, too wide strips. I stopped tying them until someone told me how to cut my own strips.

This fly is in a way my 'signature fly'. It's a beautiful fly (in my own humble opinion), and even though it's heavy - very heavy, actually - it's a good fishing fly, that dives deep and overcomes current and turbulence.