Dear Larry,
I'd like to ask you about the history of the MegaDiver.
It must have been sometime in the early 90's. I saw this video (VHS!) with Larry Dahlberg about fly fishing for pike using floating bugs. Although the image quality was awful (must have been a copy of a copy of a ...) what I saw really caught my attention. This fly nowadays known as the Dahlberg diver (the original pattern and name you used for his diving bug is MegaDiver and was tied with a long haribou and flashabou tail rather than hackles used these days which mimics frogs) was making those pikes go nuts.
Sometime ago I bought the video now available on DVD.
In the May 1990 issue of in Field & Stream magazine Nick Lyons with illustrations by Dave Whitlock wrote an article about the 'The Bass fly revolution' which shows that Dave Whitlock came up a radical new deer hair pattern called the Dave's Frog Bug (nowadays known as the Dave's or Whitlock Swimming Frog) which mimics a diving frog somewhere around the same period.
It is quite possible that both (Larry Dahlberg and Dave Whitlock) came up with a similar idea to shape the deer hair bug with a collar and a flat-ish and/or torpedo like head. What I'm very interested is, is if there have been contact between both men during the early 1990's (probably earlier in the late 1980's) about tying a deer hair bug which eventually became the MegaDiver and de Whitlock Swimming Frog? Both in the video nor the article doesn't mentions the other tier.
Could you help me (and many others who might be interested!) out on this?
Thank you for developing such an amazing concept (it's more than a pattern)!
I really enjoy tying many different types of the diver.
Best,
Jay
Ps.
I wrote on my blog about this very same question:
http://bassbug.blogspot.nl/2015/08/hot- ... -frog.html
At the end the Fly & Stream article can be read thanks to Google.