How to solve some of the ills of synthetic dubbing, perhaps even speed your fly tying

It’s the only part of the fly that works entirely against you, whose real value is the spot of color it leaves when closing the gap between tail and wing. It absorbs water, resists drying, and if ever there was a case for “less is more” this is it.

Dry fly dubbing is comparatively humdrum when compared to the litany of clever things that can be incorporated into nymph dubbing. We don’t get to play with special effects, loft or spike, and the only texture that’s helpful is soft and cloying, aiding us in wrapping it around thread.

As the fly derives so little benefit from its presence, other than the hint of color, and as it’s more hindrance than asset, we should apply a bit more science to its selection than merely whether it makes a durable rug yarn.

As beginners we were introduced to fly tying with the natural furs available from Mother Nature. We tried everything from cheap rabbit to rarified mink, and while we could appreciate the qualities we were told to look for, none of the shops carried them in anything other than natural.

There might have been three or four colors of dyed Hare’s Mask, but everything else on the shelves were the miniscule packets of synthetic dander – not the aquatic mammals mentioned in every book about dry flies written in the last half century.

Shops don’t dye materials anymore, and jobbers don’t dye real fur – as synthetic fiber is sold for pennies to the pound – and it’s shiny, which appears to be the only requirement that matters much. Real fur is expensive, has to be cut, attracts moths, and doesn’t come in pink …

When closing that gap between tail and wing, “shiny” doesn’t make our radar much, floatation does, as will fineness of fiber, flue length, texture, and color. It’s the second most common reason for fly frustration, either grabbing too much, or reaching for something ill suited to make a delicate dry fly body.

Floatation being the most desirable given our fly is cast and fished on the surface. Fineness of fiber results in a soft texture that’s easy to apply to thread, and fiber length allows us to plan how big an area of a “loaded” thread we’ll make – sizing the fur to the hook shank, ensuring we’re not needlessly causing ourselves grief when tying smaller flies.

Given that a #16 seems to be the most common size of dry fly on my waters, as it was the most common size ordered during my commercial tying days, sizing dry fly dubbing for a #16 would make my tying much easier.

That extra bit of tearing or trimming could consume 20-30 seconds, especially if you’re looking for scissors, making it one of many shortcuts that could trim minutes off a fly, enhancing whatever miniscule profits are to be had from commercial tying.

“Sizing” the dry fly dubbing to the hook shank is done by testing different fiber lengths, and determining which length yields the minimum necessary to make a complete #16 body.

Wapsi Antron, flue length = 2.5"

Assume you have a typical synthetic dubbing like Wapsi’s “Antron”, which has a flue length of just over 2.5” . If you decant a tiny bit and all two and a half inches of the fiber were wrapped with concentric turns onto a thread, what size hook would it be the body for?

Hint: a lot bigger than you think …

We can’t wrap the fibers on top of one another as it would make the dubbing too thick and would add to the moisture absorbed. We don’t want fibers too long – requiring us to snip or tear it off the thread, and it’ll burn time as we doctor the shorn area to lock it down. Extra turns of thread and time are also our enemy, making our experimentations with fiber length and the optimal thread load valuable.

A mist of dubbing

If you think back to those same aquatic mammals that were our introduction to dry fly dubbing, only the beaver had fibers that might’ve been longer than an inch, the balance of those animals; mink, muskrat, and otter, are all short haired critters.

Same Mist on the thread

Transferring that knowledge to flue length, suggests somewhere between 1/2” and 1 1/2” should give us similar handling qualities of the aquatic mammals, assuming our materials share their tiny filament width and softness.

Above is that “too small” mist of 1” fibers rendered onto thread. Spun tightly, it renders nearly an inch of body material.

Swapping the 1” fibers for 1/2” only decreased the amount of material slightly, perhaps a 1/4” less at most.

half inch fibers decreases the body only slightly

Predictably, our longer fibered Wapsi “Antron” dubbing with its 2.5” flue length covers much more thread, and despite the small diameter of its fibers, shows its unruly nature in the thickness of the noodle it makes.

Wapsi Antron dubbed onto thread

After a half dozen turns, the remainder of the above will have to be pulled off the thread and removed. Given that implies more than half of what you grabbed, isn’t that a horrible waste?

From the above picture I’d make the claim that Wapsi doesn’t market this product as a dry fly dubbing (the label mentions only dubbing). The fly shop this was purchased at had a wall full of Antron colors, and outside of some Ice Dub and a few strips of natural fur, had standardized on this product for both nymphs and dries.

What actually may have happened is that they were tired of stocking 18 different flavors of stuff that didn’t sell all that well, and reduced the collection to a single flavor – because it’s all the same right?

Wrong, and I doubt your shop manager ties flies at all.

Still fiddling with colors and fiber sizes

I’m still fiddling with fibers, colors and blends, but am almost done on the flue length tests. I’ve got a natural fiber that’s as fine as an aquatic mammal – which plays hell with blenders, but I’ve got that solved. Now all that’s left is blending of colors and dyeing – and an entreaty to those that want to field test at my expense.

Until then – and using the above photos as a reference, you can eye your local shops offering to measure what fiber length their products provide. Now that you understand that flue length is directly proportional to the amount of thread covered, you can more easily understand why you’ve consistently have more fur than you need, and how you can take a pair of scissors to the package to shorten the fibers to a more useful size.

We’ve been in a synthetic rut for the most part of a decade. Vendors are often lazy and package their materials in whatever form is easiest, often the way they receive the product, not what form makes the best fly or tightest noodle on the thread.

Scissors or a hint of natural fur added to a synthetic can tame its rug yarn roots, making it much more useful than it exists when pulled from the rack.

What constitutes Single Barbless Artificial Only

1.08. Artificial Fly.

Any fly constructed by the method known as fly tying.

1.11. Artificial Lure.

An artificial lure is a man-made lure or fly designed to attract fish. This definition does not include scented or flavored artificial baits.

California’s Fish & Game regulations weren’t crafted for guys like me. I represent the ugly underbelly of fly tying – that 1% of fly tiers who read the fine print, that truculent, uncooperative fellow whom wardens gravitate towards – who reads the rules and has always wondered about, “artificial-fly only, single barbless hook” restrictions …

… the guy you see protesting loudest as he’s lead away in manacles.

“Fly tying” is thousands of small finger skills, mostly comprised of wrapping materials never envisioned for a small hook, in a vain attempt to tame them, or copy the imagination of some SOB in a magazine (who claims it’s easy).

The Gruyere Ghost

Take my Goat Cheese Bivisible above, it’s single, barbless, and constructed by the method known as fly tying. It helps measurably if you wait for it to achieve room temperature before dubbing it onto a floss core, then winding that for the body.

Ditto for that big-arsed Pteronarcys imitation I’ve dubbed the “Gruyere Ghost” – deadly in any color or size …

… and per the above legal in a number of states …

I love the smell of Napalm in the morning, it smells like … Science

Is it a vast conspiracy of vendors dictating to a few well meaning, yet chronically underfunded conservation agencies, and can this omission of information be the final straw we need to demonstrate our collective frustration in a molten pool of self-immolated 6X tippet?

For years we’ve been serenaded by all them pale, veggie-loving scientists about our thoughtless spread of Quagga and Zebra mussels. They’re busy bashing our boats in one sentence and damning our caustic footprints in the next …

invasives

… when all this time they knew that if both Quagga and Zebra Mussels were introduced into the same lake, that the Quagga would kick Zebra ass, and there would only be a Quagga mussel problem to clean up.

Listen all! This is the truth of it. Fighting leads to killing, and killing gets to warring. And that was damn near the death of us all. Look at us now! Busted up, and everyone talking about hard rain! But we’ve learned, by the dust of them all… Bartertown learned. Now, when men get to fighting, it happens here! And it finishes here! Two mollusks enter; one bivalve leaves.

– loosely adapted from Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome

Apparently all them eggheads failed to mention how the Great Lakes is pockmarked with the scars of the two warring mollusks, and that the hordes of Quagga are spanking all comers including Asian anything and their capitol, the Edmond FitzGerald.

Horner Deer Hair with Black Thread, Humpy with Yellow, and Goofus Bug if it’s the red

I’m reminded how much of the skill is in the hands of the tier, and how much of the finished look is in the materials he selects, and for many flies the mechanical attention to proportions simply cannot fix a bad choice of materials and their effect on the final look.

Which is why we spend so much time gazing fervently at road kill and the neighbors Maltese.

The veritable Horner Deer Hair, Humpy, Goofus Bug, or by whatever local name you know the fly, is a poster child for precise hair selection. Too long a tip and the wing disappears into the hackle, and you wind up using Moose for the tail – simply because the black tip and yellow bar are too long for the size you’re tying.

Horner Deer Hair Wing, showing deer hair colors

Unless all of the colors are small enough they won’t fit on a wing which  dry deer_facefly proportions dictate is merely twice gape, and the long black tips will bury the gold bar in the thickest part of the hackle where it can’t be seen.

Deer do possess hair that will tie a Humpy smaller than size 20. The down side is that it’s the muzzle of a deer – the area between eyes and black shiny nose.

You won’t find that at the fly shop, as most of their selection is prepackaged six or eight states distant, but you may be able to find a local taxidermist whose hunter didn’t pay the bill – or some garage sale mount that isn’t too badly moth eaten or brittle and can still be salvaged.

Yellow_Humpy, hiding in all them hair extensions 

The Great Conspiracy, how you’ve grown fond of the egghead in the fly fishing label

The thought itself is fairly unnerving, you’re all part of a vast fly fishing conspiracy, whom I’d like to think will be undone by my plaintive squeal, but more likely my driveway will fill with black sedans, and I’ll be having high tea with patriots like Ollie North …

… right before my blog disappears and you’re staring at an oft-longed for “404 error.”

It all starts simply enough. I’m researching the East and West Forks of the Carson River, which I’ve never been to and will be fishing in a week or so – and my fishing buddy orders the “killer dozen”  from the local fly shop and plunks them on my desk for review.

I’m looking at seven nymphs and five dry flies, and all seven have bright golden beads and half the materials are opalescent tinsel or iridescent flash of some kind, and I’m wondering why no one besides me even notices the sudden and complete dominance of attractor flies, and how they snuck in without even the dry fly crowd noticing.

A better Pheasant Tail, or simply an attractor conversion

Trends being dominant in our fairly technical sport, with vendors and experts alike, insisting whatever we used last year cannot compare to the airy lightness of this year’s model …

This is a nymph on drugs

When Ernie Schweibert’s “Matching the Hatch” ended the reign of the attractor in the 1950’s – there was song, dance, and thousands of articles on false gods, new prophets, and every angler added Latin to his light cocktail banter.

Two fellows met on the trail and the familiar greeting had morphed into pidgin sophistication, “… caught all mine on a Ephemerella Canadensis, with a pronounced anastomosed wing, a hint of mottle, and some snowshoe hare I used to imitate the E. Pluribus Unum.”

Us “real” anglers feigned the regurge when we were out of eyesight, insisting that “His Lordship” was a “nose-inna-air” fanbois-purist, and only us backwoods types understood the true piscatorial mind, in spite of our matching ascots, flashy gear, and similar sounding lisp.

As this was pre-Bobbercator, the magazines and periodicals had room to applaud our scientific bent, knowing it was only a matter of time before one of us got the Nobel prize snapping pictures of Plecoptera fornication – or wrote the Trico-Sutra. In the meantime, Latin infused every issue and Science was the reason for an enlarged wingcase, a soft hackle, a rod taper, or a furry undercarriage.

Vendors appealed to our sudden bent towards egg headed-ness, and stopped phrasing their sales pitch in terms of luck or fancy, rather our understanding of physics had entered rarified post graduate space – and instinctively we knew that direction of the graphite weave could alter both space and time, and unless it had been to the Moon – or was a progeny of the aerospace industry it wasn’t fit garb nor tackle …

… relegating bait and lures to the Unclean Thing, whose use was an admission of Piltdown Man, low IQ and a single, unbroken eyebrow.

With fifty years of us genius’s running around the environment, insisting simply everyone must listen to every opinion, we’ve taken a fancy to all that faux-intelligence we’ve convinced ourselves we possess – which is why you appear a tad reluctant to admit …

… that attractors are functional flies with the killing power equal to a Swisher & Richards NoHack, that Latin is unnecessary when it comes to fishing – and worst yet, we haven’t been honing skills at all, instead the more consistent fish catchers are twice as LUCKY as the rest of us …

… which is why I mention the end of the single biggest trend in the last half century, and all I get a yawn …

Denial.

Let me put it to you a little differently, just so you can embrace what the next fifty years will be about …

twinkie_fish

If you perched on a log, and wired a small treble hook to your big toe and tied an overhand knot of Christmas tinsel, held your nose and keened, “eebie, eebie, Eebie” – you’ve got a better than even chance of limiting.

… If they are hatchery fish with monkeyed-genetics, you could start a goddamn cannery with that ensemble …

Knowing what I know now – the ascension of Attractors, and the validation of Bergman, Brooks, and more importantly, your Dad – which is the most painful of all given the attempts to “Xtreme” the sport and remove all vestiges of Poppa and his pipe … it doesn’t surprise me you’re attempting to cold-shoulder this fundamental shift in our beloved sport.

That’s denial squared, babe.

Every so often I wish they would reinsert me back into the Matrix with the rest of you. I long for those innocent days when the tinkle of small talk included, fast action, limp, or Spey, and we’d not so much as blink at the thousand dollar price tag, when we could move onto weightier topics, whether carbon fiber wrapped to the right is more effective than the same cloth wrapped to the left …

… but in light of this old direction of shiny and colorful flies, I can’t shake the thought that if a river moves five miles an hour and a fish can see a size twenty insect for only 12 inches – with a quarter second to decide whether to strike or no, they must eat a ton of mouse turds and cigarette butts, given the fields nearby are full of them, and when dry – float nicely …

Naturally, I’ve got a big hammy foot squarely in both worlds. Half of my nymphs start with a big gold bead and some opalescent something-or-other, and the rest are decidedly old school, given that it’s honestly quite hard to improve the efficacy of the original Pheasant Tail nymph, Zug Bug, Hare’s Ear, or AP Black, despite all of our collective attempts to make it so much more … visible.

The only difference I can detect between “new” and “old” is beads being so much heavier – whose weight is concentrated in such a small space – makes more of a splash when landing than the unweighted or weighted non-beaded fly.

Meaning, I’ll have to cast one a bit further from the quarry than the other, that’s all.

But if fish are stupid, and care not whether they eat a dislodged Caddis versus a submerged dog turd, isn’t the real issue – and root cause of your unrest – the invalidation of all that vendor bullshit, and the public disclosure that you’re a damn fool for buying expensive tackle?

In that case, a guy that pays $800 for a set of waders is a real jackass – because if a fish is dumb enough to eat anything drug through the water – than only a nincompoop blows all his cash on something expensive – unless it’s a fashion statement and being seen is everything.

Ditto for the thousand dollar rod, as you’re an idiot regardless of income level, and proof there’s a sucker born every minute …

Which is why you’re clinging desperately to the ghost of Ernest Schwiebert’s scientific angling, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in your fly box, hoping no one will notice the both of us have closets jammed with expensive gear.

Our enlarged craniums rationalized how we could purchase exceptional gear and read enough books and we’d remove “Luck” from the fishing equation …

We were excited that we’d be able to tell the rest of the world, “any Luck?” was a heinous slur, and how it was raw … goddamn … smarts that made us successful, not luck …

… luck was for guys that smeared marshmallow-salmon egg on their pant’s leg, who sat and watched the gals sunbathing while getting drunk, steadfastly ignoring both rod tip and its commotion.

So you cling to your anatomically correct dry flies for fear someone will notice the same thing I did, and won’t tell a friend of a friend – who knows your wife, so the next time you beg for an aircraft-grade anything, she’ll scoff at the notion of it bleeding energy when the anti-matter based disc turns gaseous, and how real masculinity requires you to have not one – but a pair of them.

It’s ok, your Dad had plenty of science backing his assertion that an Alexandra, with its fetching iridescent Peacock and sliver of red quill wing, was so killing a fly because red was the color of blood and therefore all that silver tinsel body was wounded … and … so very vulnerable …

You don’t want to play that game with me – do you?

His lordship is spending the next fortnight despoiling the Royal and Ancient with a Singlebarbed lid.

Wannabe_TravelWriter While I mentioned that both respect for the out of doors and culture existed across the pond , and not the flavor us colonials practice, with our four wheel, gas guzzling offroad equipment and medical waste …

He still insisted on tormenting me with the above picture, with the following inscription;

“I found that place you said I should look for … Hardy & Gray’s, and they’re having a really big sale on fly tying materials; Baby Seal, Polar Bear, Toucan, Speckled Bustard … I don’t recognize any of that but they’re on the list you gave me. The person at the counter mentioned I might run into problems with Customs on my return and wanted to check with you – is he right?”

Dear TravelWriter, they always say that. Ignore his warning, he’s merely jealous that he doesn’t get to fish for free in all the public fly water available in the US … double down on my order of baby seal, and if the TSA guy or Customs asks you what it is, just say, “Freshly Clubbed Baby Seal, and I’m Rick James – Bitch!”

How to trim your fly tying obligation by half

The Thrill:

Noticing that Bass flies look nearly identical to flies for rockfish and perch.

Are these Bass flies, or Saltwater?

The Thrill that Comes Once in a Lifetime:

Confirming that theory by prying the brightly colored SOB out of the wrong fishes mouth … and noting that the hint of rust didn’t appear to spoil the reception nor the lust induced strike that followed …