Designing and Tying Fishing Flies Part 2/3

Now we’re going to do a bead chain in here for a little bit of weight. We just lay that right up on the top. And we’re going to figure eight that right on so it’s fairly secure. One of the tricks in tying a bead chain or a lead eye is you come around the ends of it and keep your thread on top of the hook shank and that really secures it well in place. Trim off that little bit of mess there.

Now we've got it, we’ve got the fillers in place, we've got the eyes to somewhat you can call these eyes but we’re going to show you something else that works even better a little bit later on in this pattern. Now what we’re going to use for the body is a material called the stash and we're going to take a hackle and palmer those together.

All right, we've got our basic materials here. This is a stash, it’s a really neat material as you can see it’s fairly flashy but I won’t to get down with this. It’s not going to be near as flashy. I don’t like a lot of flash in my bone fish flies or shrimp flies. I think it the turns the fish off. They’ll scare them a little bit. But you want a little bit because the shrimp or the shell of the shrimp is going to have a little shank to it so you want a little bit.

The other is a nice Olive hackle down from about the middle of the hackle. We don’t want it too big but we want it—it's got to be long enough. It works on the track one of those out of there. That’s a really good one right there. So we’ll set these aside for minute. A lot of things in tying flies and designing flies I got three basic criteria.

Number one I have to be able to tie the fly in three minutes or less or maybe four minutes stretch it. I’ll have to remember all the commercial fly tier. I can't spend the half hour or an hour time on one fly. I'm starve to death as it is but you just can't do that, it's not cause conscious and it just doesn’t work, nor do I want to spend a lot of time on a fly 30 minutes. I have this gorgeous perfect looking museum quality fly.

Throw it out there in about a nine inch snapping blue fish comes up and eats it and that’s it, it’s gone. One bite one fly. I don’t probably want him to catch the fish but it’s something to remember. Another two criteria, it has to catch the fisherman. It has to be attracted to the fisherman. If it’s not, it’s not going to sell. So it’s not worth putting it on the market. And the third the most critical part is, it has to catch fish. If it doesn’t catch fish, why have it? It’s got to work, so and all mine are tested by a number of people. You’d recognize some names like Lefty Kreh and Rick Ruoff and Bob Clouser and some of these are all friends of mine. It’s really fortunate for me because I can send them half a dozens to try these out and let me know if they work. And more important what doesn’t work on it, what would you change if you see something in there? That’s really important to me.

So those—using those three kind of criteria we design the fly. And then, since as I said before, we’re doing the shrimp fly so, what we’re going to do is we're going to take this hackle and we’re going to tie that hackle in first. There’s a very specific reason for doing that and I’ll get into that or just take the hackle by the tip and just sort of stroke it down in this fashion. Set the barbules of the feather stick out a little bit. And we come in and tie that in place right there, right up against that bead chain. And then we take our stash and tie it in right on top of the hackle.

If we tied the stash in first and then tie the hackle. The hackle would be leading at the stash as we palmer. And we’re going to do whip finish. We finish this by hand a really critical to me. I don’t have a time to fool around with a little machine that a whip—a mechanical wood finisher nor will some of them, I'm sure they have them on the market today that will reach down in here to whip finish at the back of the fly. Mostly I'm finish in front of the fly and a lot of the flies I tie finish at the back so we have to be able to whip finish by hand. Plus it’s quicker by the time you pick it up and thread it, I'm already done. I've done it by hand and I'll try to explain it to how to do it.

And what we just fastened to our vise is called the thread cradle and the thread cradle will allow me to turn the vise without my thread winding up and down the hook shank. So now we’re going to take this hackle and the stash and on the right hand and lay it in there on about a 45 degree angle and slowly turn this until we get it to where we want it and now we’re going to just coat the whole shank and palmer this all the way down to the eye.

And as you can see the effect that we’re getting here sort of wooly bugger type if you look at the thing, you know it that sort of sticks after all over the place and we’d get up in here now we’re going to stop. Well take our thread and lay it back over and so it comes underneath. Keep that thread cradle out of the way.

This is really important what I'm doing here. This is called small circles as suppose to giant circles. You have much better control over your thread when you're winding in small circles as suppose to giant circles. If you have really sweeping wraps, you don’t have any real control like that. Of course if we bring this right up in here, we’ve got a lot better control and at the same time you see how I’m clasping this bobbin in my hand. I'm adjusting the tension as I go.

I can increase it or let it off and at first very freely or we wind this back up through illustration. I can clamp down on it. It don’t flow at all which is really helpful to you as you're tying your fly. Now we trim off the hackle but not the stash not yet.