“I came up with the Thundergrass hopper as a follow up fly to my successful Sweetgrass hopper that Umpqua released a number of years ago.

I am excited for this one to come out and have been fine tuning it now for a number of years.

The end goal was to come up with another extremely realistic hopper pattern that floats well, but also sits lower and is slurp-able and easy to feed a wised up fish.

I borrowed the legs from Eric Paramore’s brilliant Thunder Thighs hopper, along with elements of the Sweetgrass along with a few new ideas- like the cylindrical body which makes a wonderfully realistic profile.

The Thundergrass also does not have any rubber to rot off if you don’t use it for a while- always a pet peeve of myself and other anglers.

The fly is also very scalable down to the tiniest of sizes and it easy to control the proportions and keep them the same throughout the different sizes.

We also slipped in a TMC wet fly hook that will hold up to heavier tippets and also make the fly sit a bit lower in the column than many all-foam hoppers.”

– Signature Tyer Doug McKnight