Essential Guide to Fly Tying

 Learning how to tie dry flies has always been a major goal for me. Before reading this book "Essential Trout Flies" by Dave Hughes, I didn't know how to tie dry flies. The reason why I never learned it was because tying flies was a huge hobby for my grandmother and I until she passed away. We never made it to tying dry flies but I loved the way they floated down stream and the fact that you see the fish break the surface of the water to take the fly.

This time I figured out that my problem with tying flies was, not using a green background. In the book, "Essential Trout Flies" by Dave Hughes, he taught me, "Whatever type of tyng area you use, cover the surface behind the vise with a sheet of light green artist's mat board" (Hughes 6). This gives me an advantage while tying flies by allowing me to differentiate the threads/strings apart from each other. This will help especially when I get into tying advanced flies when I'm using multiple threads and materials at the same time. I found out that you can use any thing as the background as long as it's green.

The picture below is the materials I used for the fly I'm tying. "Dry flies should always be tied with materials that repel rather than absorb water. Dry flies are the flies that float on the water instead of sinking hence the name dry flies" (Hughes 18).

The picture below is of me doing the basic Soft Loop (Just like in the last post) which is the main way to tying the material you are using to the hook with your thread. "You'll use a soft loop nearly every time you tie a new material to the hook shank- tails, bodies, wings, whatever" (Hughes 14).

Next I made sure to create the thorax region of the mayfly which is fatter than the back half. "Wrap five evenly spaced turns of hackle forward over this thorax" (Hughes 22).

Hughes emphasizes to use strong and good quality materials when tying dry flies. He does this because the quality of material really makes what type of fly you're tying. In this picture, I'm using the soft loop technique to tie a new material onto the hook. "Any stiff, web-free rooster neck or saddle feathers are best for dry-fly hackles and tails, soft and webby hen or poor-grade rooster for wet flies, nymphs, and streamers" (Hughes 18).

After this, you wanna make sure you trim any excess material hanging over/in the eye of the hook. This is a key step because if you don't then when you completely tie off the fly you will close the eye of the hook. To completely tie off a fly, you want to use some type of cement. I use clear nail polish because its the easiest to come by and the easiest to apply straight onto the fly. If you have a closed eye of a hook you can't get your line through it so you can't tie the fly onto your line. "Be sure that the eye of every fly is clear of both thread and cement before you make the final transfer from the tying bench to your fly box" (Hughes 16).

These are pretty bad dry flies but this helped me get used to tying stiff material and trimming material on the hook. I don't think I would ever fish with these flies because they aren't that appealing and I think I used to much fur. The fly looks bigger than what a natural fly in Washington would look like.

One piece of advice I can offer someone with this experience is that when you tie a dry fly, make sure you are ready to tie on your material when you cut it (especially if its a stiff material). If you aren't ready to tie it on but you cut some off, you will most likely have a hard time holding the material while trying to thread the hook. I made this mistake when I was tying these flies, I cut a piece of the deer fur off before I was ready to tie it on and I ended up dropping it all and making a huge mess. Another piece of advice is to use anything that is the color green as the back drop behind your vise. This was so much easier on my eyes because I didn't have to look super close to see where the threads were and where all my feathers(materials) were. A third tip is if you don't have fly head cement, then use clear nail polish. It dries faster and it's a lot easier to be more precise when going around the eye of the hook.

Do any fly tiers have any tips to help me tie more appealing dry flies?

Citation:
Hughes, Dave. Essential Trout Flies. China: Jim Schollmeyer, Tracy Patterson and K Yonenoi, 2000.