Category Archives: Fly Tying

Where we pay a little homage to the cockroach of the Skies

At times I think even PETA hates starlings, universally reviled – it seems even little old ladies consider them cockroaches of the sky …

When I lived in the woods the local rice farmers would pay for your ammo, sending great groups of killers onto the paddies to blow hell out of yellow-hooded and redwing blackbirds. I tried desperately to come up with fly patterns that would allow for an orderly disposal of so many carcasses and failed miserably…

… something about black makes it an absolute must-have – but like licorice, you “must-have” in small doses …

Having re-upped the half dozen skins I keep around, and flush with small, soft black hackle – I’m reminded of all the other uses it was put to back in the day…

Starling_Skins

Strangely enough outside of using it for black hackle on all forms of sinking flies, mostly I used it as Poor Man’s Jungle Cock …

Starling_Feather

Most of the hackle feathers on the back and shoulders have a nicely defined yellow tip. Grab a pair of them and slide one down about a quarter inch …

starling_cocque A bit of wax or vinyl head cement (flexible) is all that’s needed to transform a tawdry little bird into something a rich kid that likes flutes is willing to steal for …

… knowing where he’s headed we’ll observe a brief moment of solemn knowing his fly tying is bound to suffer in the face of the sudden demand for his flautist skills …

The Faces of Genius: Reduced Bomber

This was a reduction of a Upper Sacramento classic, Ted Fay’s Black Bomber. Plenty can be said of Ted Fay flies, most would say “really heavy.” They weren’t graceful or slender, and I dreaded a big order as it was the only fly I had to tie holding my nose. Not that the flies were bad, they just required so much lead they were unstable.

You could spin the brown or black chenille body around the hook with ease.

Gary Warren was a longtime resident of Burney, California, and knew both Joe Kimsey and Ted Fay. In between guiding Hat Creek and Fall River, he’d fish the Upper Sacramento and adapted the fly to Hat Creek and the Pit River by removing the grizzly wings and the second and third layer of lead wire.

Thankfully, you could now throw the fly without fear of concussion or outright amputation.

He kept the “Bomber” moniker, but I altered the name to distinguish the original and its adaptation.

Gary Warren's Reduced Bomber

Grizzly hackle tail, tied short. Brown or Black chenille for the body, and three turns of undersized grizzly saddle at the head. Gary preferred ring eyed hooks – as shown above.

In looking at all these flies there’s little question that simplicity rules. They sit in your fly box all alone until you’ve tried all the sexy stuff, and when you finally succumb and lash it to your leader, you remember all the superlatives your buddy used when he handed them to you.

The Faces of Genius: Chartreuse Unknown

As much as we’d like it to warn us, great flies have no aura about them when removed from the vise, no halo to clue its creator to cease embellishment, as his creation will be the bane of local gamefish for the next couple of decades.

We’ve taken it for granted we can spot fishy potential and great colors, most of us have fly boxes bulging with imitation bug parts, gooey soft textures, and colors dripping with authenticity.

The fact we carry so many is clue that we really can’t tell what a fish thinks, likes, or eats.

To remind me that I know nothing of fish vision, let alone what stimulates taste, I would add special flies to my driver’s side sun visor. Flies that caught 20” fish and those whose consistent greatness had earned them a place in what would become a testimonial to what large wary fish preferred …

… and why gooey textures, feelers, and bug parts didn’t appear in any of the really successful flies, most of which didn’t even look buggy to my eye.

chartreuse_unknown

Chartreuse floss body overwrapped with fine copper wire, no particular pattern – just lay on forty turns until about half the chartreuse has been covered. Two turns of dark partridge hackle and a grizzly tail completes this unknown work.

… no eyeballs, no individual legs, and a primary color that you’d be hard pressed to find in Mother Nature…

No name that I can remember, given to me by a client that swore by it, and after my lip curled uncontrollably, I let him try it just so he’d stop fidgeting with his flies and start fishing all my better ideas.

… fortunately we didn’t need any of my flies.

Tied in sizes from #10 – #14, he mentioned how he’d assumed the fish ate it as a green caddis.

As I’ve recently unearthed the box of flies I removed from that visor, I figured to share some of the nameless patterns you’ll never see in any fly shop, just to give those that are struggling with invention a glimpse of pure death – and how little refinement and entomology is really needed.

We got brown bugs, they got brown bugs … which is why old flies persist

Fiddling with classics Every fly fisherman has their moment. A big fish lounging in the shallows and a favorable breeze leaves the fly just where you want, floating idly down to the ravenous white maw below. Some are unfortunate enough to get a head-bob, or flare of fins upwards, some even see greatness coming up through the water column on an intercept, only to be thwarted by some imaginary hair out of place, or the unseen pull of drag.

Fly tiers have their moment too. Despite beginner vise and too-thick thread, poorly lighted kitchen table and recalcitrant grizzly hackle, somehow perfection comes of adversity. Proportions correct, body graceful and tapered, no glue obscuring the eye – and if wasn’t for the yellow saddle hackle tail, which substituted for brown, it might be the best fly you’ve ever tied.

Naturally you rushed to show Sensei, the relative or friend that got you into this cash-hemorrhaging hobby, whose wise council is sought on all major purchases and fly related topics, and rather than being appreciative, he becomes irate and indignant.

“That’s not an Adam’s, an ADAM’s does not have a yellow tail, an Adam’s has on occasion an all-brown tail, sometimes a mixed grizzly and brown tail, but never … and I mean NEVER … does a fly as noble and historic as an ADAM’s sport a goddamn yellow tail.”

( … fly then tossed onto table top like the Unclean thing.)

For the burgeoning fly tier it’s a crushing experience, no one noticed it was technically perfect, a fact ignored in the great upwelling of indignity resulting from experimenting with a time honored classic. No pause in the backlash oratory to claim innocence, the yellow used only because you lacked brown hackle long enough …

The sting of that experience destined to stifle creativity for years …

As odd as it sounds, it may be one of the common questions asked by a fledgling tier, “… when is it OK to invent your own flies?”

It would be safe to say that most fly fishermen learn to cast and fish before learning to tie flies. Those two disciplines will give the angler experience in the forces destined to tear flies apart, and give an appreciation for some of the attributes flies require, like an eye clear of  hair, glue, or foreign substance.

Knowing why each component of the fly exists and the qualities it lends to making the pattern successful would be beneficial, as would the ability to secure the component correctly, ensuring some knowledge of stressors and points of fragility may be necessary as well.

As learning to tie flies is a study in substitution, considering the thousands of colors and materials we’ll accumulate, the last element would be some expertise in the materials themselves, so you can substitute freely, or tinker with patterns and evolve them into your style of fishing more effectively.

Which hair floats, which synthetics are tough and resist tearing, which feathers are stiff and resilient and can be used for tails. Expertise at this level comes from a lifetime of fishing and tying, and as knowledge grows so will the degree of tinkering.

… with only the sting of our first accidental foray to haunt us.

After many years of blind adherence to pattern books and featured flies in magazines, what actually makes a great fly is still unknown. There’s no visible qualities that distinguish an experimental from a time-honored classic, nothing to denote why an Elk Hair Caddis is found in every fly shop when something similar isn’t.

What’s surprising is that nationwide adoption has no real criteria other than good marketing and commercial availability. Which is why eastern dry flies continue to dominate every shop’s dry fly selection, even if the original insects don’t exist on the West coast, or the western variety is of different color.

How fast those classic fly bins empty is a function of perceived beauty, or perceived buggy-ness, and has little to do with local bugs and its real world efficacy.

We got brown bugs, they got brown bugs … which is why old flies persist.

Thankfully fish are stupid, which is why cigarette butts are struck as often as Female Cahill’s tied with the yellow egg sacs, and fish eat flies twice the size of those hatching, which keeps us aging starlets in the game.

In short, a new tier should start experimenting once he’s learned how to mechanically build a fly, and should feel free to start fresh or alter classic flies regardless of their history and legacy.

… and the opinions of their buddies, who’ll feel entitled to free flies for life anyways.

Fly tying is already hard enough with plenty willing to heap scorn on your best efforts. Too many tiers remain constrained and dormant assuming that a classic pattern will catch more fish than a wild idea spawned by a curl of colorful floss and a dash of whimsy.

Your flies didn’t participate in all that holiday food, but they can stand a bit of reducing just the same

With a bit of sun poking through the weather, I’m reminded that fish exist and I’ve got holes aplenty in my fly box from last season. This time it’s the flymphs that took a beating – and it being the self pronounced Second Coming of the Attractors, I’m restocking not the dull and drab – but all the colorful patterns I hid from prying eyes while telling the crowd it was something I’d made from ocher sock yarn …

… which reminded me further of the hellish time I had learning how to reduce a dressing down to just enough to be ate consistently, but not smothering the pattern with too much material.

Starling & Green

The lower left fly is tied with an intact Starling hackle, while the rest of the flies are tied with one side of the feather removed. Four or five strands of starling will give plenty of motion, more just dampens the wiggle as a neighboring strand blocks movement.

prepped_starling_feather

Starling feathers being under two inches long and quite fragile, you’ll need to prepare the feather by removing all the gray fibers off both sides of the stem, before carefully removing all of the right side fibers (if wrapping clockwise, left side if counter-clock) and tying in the feather where the hackle is to be wound.

 

winding_starling

As we only have one side fibered, two turns is just enough to apply a single turn of hackle, perhaps five to seven strands.

The reduced dressings look simple, but often have subtleties that reveal themselves when you’ve got a handful of gossamer and are only partway through a mighty oath.

Both body and head use a bit more fancy threadwork than meets the eye. The bobbin is spun so the thread ties flat like a floss rather than round like thread. Us old guys set store by this quality in the Nymo days of the 70’s, and it still works with 6/0 and 8/0 threads that are not unifilament style. Simply let the bobbin dangle and it will spin flat to remove all twist you’ve added via previous turns. Once it stops spinning the thread will lay flat like floss, until you add more torque by wrapping. Flat thread has less bulk than round thread, so it spreads itself onto the hook like a film versus a tightly wound single strand of material.

It’s a nice effect, the body is uncommon smooth and the head is small and dainty.

Starling & Green

This is a Redditch scale #12 heavy wire hook. That would be a #14 in today’s longer shank hooks. The heavy wire adds enough weight to drag the reduced dressing down to fish in mid column – great for emerging bugs and pre-hatch feeding.

No parallel in nature for a 4mm shiny gold bead, and none of the important aquatic food groups are so equipped.

Ernie_Schweibert I was convinced the story behind bead headed flies and their speedy domination of the sport was due to fly tiers who dreaded completing that gracefully tapered head, that final step which revealed their skill set even to the casual observer.

Weight has always been problematic for fly fishing. The letter of the law allows you to add as much lead as possible so long as it’s covered up, the rest of us especially those without ethics or refined breeding add a big shiny goober-esque bead – elegant in getting the fly down to where fish are, reducing all the discarded split shot us fishermen have been salting the watershed with for the last decade.

We feel bad about the lead / waterfowl thing, but only because of all that wasted flank and oily duck’s arse we can no longer live without. They’ve expired via heavy metal inhalation … accidental versus the double barreled kinetic flavor we had in mind.

Instead the bead phenomenon is considerably larger than all that. The  real story is our adoption of the literal and scientific elements of fly fishing being complete. We’ve garnered all the fish killing properties of higher learning, entomology and Latin, and are assured there is no stone left unturned, only a return to the gaily colored attractor flies of yesteryear may provide us with additional challenges.

Ignoring all the mean spirited and literal dialog discussed by the forum crowds; whether a beaded fly is in-fact a fly versus a weighted lure, and the passions that conversation awakens, what we can all agree upon is there is no parallel in nature for a 4mm shiny gold bead, and none of the important aquatic food groups are so equipped.

Certainly it assists sinking the fly quickly, but it also adds the same tinsel flash as the traditional wet flies of the 30’s thru 50’s. Ray Bergman and his cohort may have pitched a horrible scene at the prospect of fishing all that weight, but he was fishing over a couple hundred percent more trout (ditto for wilderness) and probably didn’t need to resort to such gimmickry, as there were ample fish in the shallow water.

Fundamental shifts in angling perception tend to hang around for decades. “Matching the Hatch” dominated the last 40 years, attractors before that, and the trends before those are largely lost to us, but “nobility and butterflies” remain, along with the occasional hoary text and odd references to “yellow flye” whose legendary hatches turned the sky of both Tigress and Euphrates, “as darke as nyght.”

Only dry fly fishing remains reasonably intact, the physics of floating a fish hook being unchanged despite iPad’s and Internet, and the drab colors of emerging insects being the sole constant on any aquatic menu.

Gone are the smallish and somber flies of steelhead fishing; the stonefly nymphs and egg imitations abandoned for big water-moving attractors whose garish purples and strung ostrich herl hackles have redefined the pursuit of migratory fisheries.

Coarse fishing and its rise to prominence may have had a small role in this, but it’s more likely that natural had worn itself thin due to age and numerous shortcomings. Big beaded colorful flies seduces all the common warm water species, and even the uncommon ones we encountered in urban settings, giving us twice the reason to add a boxful to our vest. Inevitably we found the box while searching for a solution for fussy trout, and despite our fearful glance skyward, no lightning bolt spat from the Heavens as proof that a vengeful Schweibert had been awakened from a dusty grave.

The physical gear followed close on the heels of our new appreciation for color. Puce rods feature Day-Glo backing, shiny gold reels, and anglers boldly announcing their presence with authority, with liberal application light refracting gadgets  and Miami Vice pastels to assist us in blending into the surrounding underbrush and its shadows.

Our fly tying materials underwent similar change. Opalescent being the dominant new material of the last decade, showing itself in dubbing, tinsel, and sheet – all of which were eagerly incorporated into contemporary patterns of both fresh and salt. “Sparkles” are in, and both packaged dubbing and artificial hair vie to outshine each other with gaudy light refractive qualities, often as their only real attribute.

Us fly fishermen typically fixate on a prophet to attribute our 180 degree about face of conventional wisdom, some new Oracle of angling that we can toast at speaking engagements, delights in upending all we’ve held sacred, and commands those heady comps of the swank remote lodge cartel.

Schweibert had his 15 minutes, as did LaFontaine and sparkle yarn, now it’s the rebirth of the attractor – forged in the steely cauldron of the former Eastern Bloc, and returned to prominence with long rods, rainbow hued Czech nymphs, and the two fly cast, proving that which is ancient  can be expensive again …

Now you can empty the bucket into the sewer proudly, knowing you’ve stunted less fish

Dyeing materials organically The fun part is you can make every bit as much mess, and your sudden interest in walnut shells won’t be attributable to your fly tying obsession.

She’ll think you’re being “extra good” because of the pending holidays, and your sudden desire to crack all those walnuts are merely foreplay for the fruitcake.

By my count there’s at least 30 colors hidden in your cupboard and the plants that make up your backyard, and if you can make a gallon of tea without wearing it – you’re on your way to handling all your color needs in a toxin free, mostly organic environment.

… which will not get you out of the doghouse should you steal her pots or dribble their contents on her linoleum, but as you don’t need heat and can dump the contents at your curb, you shouldn’t find yourself in the kitchen at all.

The book is called “Wild Color” and is a cleverly done manual on dyeing fibers (both organic and inorganic) with natural materials; leaves, stems, seeds, flowers, and crushed fiber from household items and decorative plants.

This book was a very quick read, and informative. This is not some dogged treatise on proper Ph and dye bath temperatures as much as it is a first book on the subject, striking a nice light balance of material directly on topic, and some of the history of garments and their coloration, some of the odd sources of colors, and how geography played a defining role in both common and exotic coloration.

Organic dyes are a combination of stain (brute force color) and “teas” enhanced with the proper mordant. Mordants are fixatives, dilute solutions of copper, aluminum, and iron, that assist the natural color to affix itself to animal fiber or cloth.

Mordants are made simply by adding white vinegar and water in equal measure and throwing a couple copper plumbing fixtures into the liquid for a week. Ditto for iron solutions or aluminum. This gives you the hobbyist, the ability to make all the items you need from their source, and not having to pay for anything other than the plant or food.

… better yet, flush with this new “green-ness” you can wait until your neighbor’s asleep and then pillage his Eucalyptus.

Half the book is devoted to the plants that provide the color, and the range of colors each plant is capable of given the mordant used. Dandelions used with copper mordant yields a medium olive, but with an acidic mordant may yield yellow.

It should be no surprise that anything you scuffed on a pant’s leg in your youth has potential as a colorizing agent. All that’s needed is for you to be a bit more surgical in your application.

Organic dyes are not capable of dyeing everything. The intensity of the bath may actually stain some materials that cannot be dyed, but considering our ancestors made use of animal hides and leathers, as well as woven fabrics like cotton and wool – all of which were successfully dyed in many colors, it’s safe to assume you should be able to get both pastel shades and many combinations that will result in much darker colors.

Given that dead and dried plants are desired to brew colors, I would think a visit to a nursery might yield a lot of free exotic plants that have dried past their prime, or simply died while on the vendor’s premise. This book will give you the names to ask for and a nice picture of the plant while living – everything needed to assist your collecting.

I’ve dabbled in natural dyes for some time, but only those whose materials are common to my locale (or to the neighbors backyard). All those neat piles of plant debris at the curb have yielded quite a few finds that I’ve used to make earthy tones of brown and olive, and it can be a lot of fun to devote a gallon jug in the garage to steeping a mixture of bat’s wing, and eyelash of newt …

… knowing the poor SOB next to me has none of them big stoneflies that smell like licorice …

An engaging read, especially the introduction outlining the earliest sources of purples, why they were so hard to find, and why the Celt’s of the British Isles were so fond of blue. Guaranteed to make you never look at an onion skin in quite the same way again.

Onion_Skin

The above shows how the plant pages are organized. The material has a brief discussion outlining which parts of the plant contain the coloring agent, and whether they are best used dried or fresh. For each of the materials the bars of reference colors (at left) describe what you will get when used with the different types of mordants (alkaline, acid, aluminum, copper, or iron).

As with any colorizing agent some experimentation is necessary. Some of these colors are susceptible to fading in direct sunlight, as they lack all the chemical finery of traditional aniline dyes, and are often much less concentrated than a couple of heaping teaspoons of a powderized dye.

Earth tones aren’t so bad as regards fading, but anything solid colored, and especially red, should have a chunk nailed to a fence post for a week or two to see if the finished product is stable.

Cost of this tome is $15.35 from Amazon.com, and it may yield something useful to those that wish to avoid caustic chemicals and toxins.

Full Disclosure: I bought this book from Amazon.com for the above price

Dyeing and Bleaching Natural Fly Tying Materials

It's not Best's Best Being the only book of its kind might tip the scales somewhat, but I was hoping for a bit more.

I purchased a copy of A. K. Best’s, “Dyeing and Bleaching Natural Fly-Tying Materials” and spent last week intent on learning some of the differences in style and cautionary information the author has for prospective colorists.

There wasn’t a great deal of information for those having already trod that path. He is generous in the degreasing, he wears gloves, has been banished from his kitchen, and is overly fond of things he can buy at a supermarket.

… and he mentions a “dyeing room” while I’m dealing with Ma’s Kitchen – suggesting Mr. Best may be fastidious in preparation and clean up, and I may be the Oscar to his Felix.

Of interest to me was the use of coffee urns, stainless steel food containers, and hot plates as a heat source. I assumed he’d slurped something onto the Missus’s linoleum and he’d been banished from the kitchen much earlier in his dyeing career, and these implements were forced on him as was the garage.

Hot plates are something I don’t use much, only because of all the apartment fires they caused in my youth. Considering their built-in thermostat it would give more precision to a heat source than raw flame and a thermometer. You’ll just have to remember to turn them off to be safe.

Small batches of material would dye nicely in a 12 cup coffee urn, as it would preserve both dye and keep the dye liquid small and manageable. Nor would it hurt to have a few extra nearby should the real coffee urn take a tumble and shatter. Glass cleans so much nicer than metal or porcelain lined containers – and is impervious to salt as well.

As a first book on dyeing the text may offer good service. Its focus is almost entirely using RIT dyes, and while mentioning Veniard (acid) dyes, there’s not a lot of discussion on frailties or virtues of one over the other. RIT being as close as the local store and therefore gets the nod.

Which is a disservice to the pupil, as RIT and Tintex have their moments, but the acid dyes possess superior color to their salt-fixed brethren, and so long as you don’t shirk from mail order are every bit as available.

There is some brief discussion of the virtue of the artist’s color wheel, a chapter with a dozen RIT-based formulas for common fly tying colors, another on stripping chicken and peacock quills using bleach in a destructive manner, but discussion was largely superficial, with not a lot of material on the all-important why’s of the colorization process.

I would have expected some thoughts on color from his fishing experiences, perhaps a dab on color as compared to trout vision, or a mention of how colors perform with water depth. Instead the last couple of chapters were devoted to biots and fur blending, and offered only brief commentary, about as long as a magazine article.

I thought biots were an odd choice for a dyeing book as there’s nothing terrible special in dyeing them compared to any flight feather, and a much larger text is necessary to address fur dubbing. Five pages wasn’t much of a treatment given the permutations and use of color possible with furs and mixing different fibers.

The chapter devoted to color removal was my favorite. It’s one of those odd tasks we don’t get to practice very often, as most of our material preparation involves adding color versus removing it. Learning that bleach behaves differently on clothes versus raw fibers, is one of those painful lessons learned once and never forgotten.

I suppose when your kid shows up at the door and reveals the blue lightning bolt down his scalp – it’s nice to know what options you have in the matter.

In summary, I find the book useful but odd. Two or three topics that don’t belong well with the overall topic, which should have been omitted to make room for resources a budding alchemist could leverage to perfect his craft, or a bit more on the science of color, or perhaps more recipes and photos of color samples.

Most of the work relies on references to RIT and Tintex colors which were common when the first edition was published in 1993. As most dye companies add and subtract colors routinely, and what’s left of the Tintex company is in Australia – some of the colors referenced may no longer be available.

It’s a “good” starter book and nothing more. As it’s the only thing available on the topic written for fly tiers, it may warrant a second look.

Full Disclosure: I purchased the book used from Amazon.com. The price for a second edition hardcover was $17.00 in excellent condition.

Fly fishing crime while colorful, may not pay

I figure all the talk of “extreme” went to the lad’s head, and eager to jumpstart his fly tying materials collection he knocked over the natural history museum as an act of “extreme feather collecting.”

A fly tier's dream

At the time of the theft it was postulated that one of the markets these rare birds carcasses might be headed for was the Atlantic Salmon Full Dress Featherwing crowd, whose morals regarding rare feathers are non-existent.

We may never know his intent, but the 22 year old perpetrator has been apprehended in England, with nearly 300 rare bird carcasses recovered.

To make matters worse he was an American …

… that smelled like moth balls.

It’s a fly tying makeover, where we cross fingers and hope we’re not watering down genius to the point of ineffectual

At times I think an entirely separate blog is required to cover concepts of fly design, material handling, and methods of attachment.  We’re often focused on visual imitation of the natural that we lose sight of the practical issues of swimming behavior and attitude in the water.

The only thing close to fiddling with someone else’s great idea and making it yours is cooking. You add additional tasty things hoping the sum of all parts is even better … and that’s not always the case.

To mitigate the fervor of inspiration and the wild frenzy it induces, I use three separate processes to adapt someone else’s idea to my fly box and style of fishing.

Combinations and Permutations:  Fiddle with the idea alone, just to see what else it can do, and what else it would be good at …

Optimization: examine the rest of the fly to ensure other materials are matched with the new functionality, or assist its unique quality.

Swim Test: use the fly in a stream, lake, or bathtub, in the same manner it will be fished in the real world.

One or more of the phases will show a bad or impractical modification, a weakness in the materials chosen, or an attitude shift (caused by a material choice or attachment style) that cause the swimming fly to appear different than the natural or phase of the real insect you’re imitating.

In this case I’m still enamored of the bead-chained body from last week. and the feature being the massive weight of the body after attaching 4 – 6 brass beads.

Full Dubbed variant

Here’s an example of the Combination & Permutation phase, the full dubbed variant. I’ve merely topped the mess with a waxed nylon fiber wingcase as a placeholder for whatever I finally decide upon.

It certainly looks good if thrown with an eight weight. I’ve inserted dubbing between every joint in the chain, which extends all the way to the eye (7 full beads). The body remains flexible but is no longer droopy, and the nylon fibers are indestructible so the wingcase choice is actually an Optimization decision.

Seven brass beads mounted on the top of the fly will cause the fly to ride upside down, so the wingcase is mounted underneath the hook as a Swim decision. All that weight means it’ll be hitting every rock, every sunken tree limb and incur a great deal of damage. The nylon wingcase is impervious to impact, so it’s mounted for Swim, with material chosen per an Optimize quality.

Were you to mount the traditional slip of oak turkey as a wingcase, it would probably last about four casts before being broken to pieces. Which might be just fine – as you’ll probably leave this in a sunken tree limb every second cast …

Czech Nymph Style

Here’s the same fly tied in the Czech Nymph style. Beads follow the curvature of the hook and are secured at each joint. I’ve used the same black nylon fiber for the wingcase – but this time it’s distributed all the way around the fly – and the fly’s attitude in the water is now moot.

All Czech nymphs ride upside down, their attitude being a combination of shape of the hook and placement of the lead wire underbody. Its a mystery to me why they aren’t tied upside down,  that waxy and grub-like shellback points at the river bottom and not where the fish can spy it.

In extending the “wingcase” material completely around the hook means I’ve eliminated the top and bottom of the fly, and the fly looks identical from every angle.

All the same rationale explained above applies here. Material choices made for banging on rocks and surviving, fly tied to swim as the real bug might – if it were curled to protect its nuts while tumbling downstream.

I suspect that the steelhead version will retain the brass bead chain, but the trout flavor will be moved to aluminum anodized beads. The properties of bead chain are identical, only the weight will differ – and the aluminum will allow the bug to be cast versus lobbed – and fished only on the short line.