Male Speaker: The next technique that we'll discuss is applying tinsel before the body material is attached. Typically in Classic Salmon flies, there are up to two or potentially even three tinsels applied to the body to add flesh. There was a utilitarian purpose associated with tinsel that had to do with protecting the hackle stem from breaking.

We can look at this graphic. If this represents the hook shank with the head of the fly to the right and the bend to the left, if there were two tinsels, the flat tinsel would lie in front of the bundle or the configuration of tinsels, oval tinsel would be next, moving rearward and then the hackle would lie against the oval and the reason for this was, Salmon being toothy fish would bite into the oval tinsel first theoretically and avoid biting into the hackle which would unwind, being metal tinsel it would be less likely to be cut on the fish's teeth. So we'll talk about the arrangement of hackle and tinsel now as it pertains to a Salmon fly body.

One thing to think about in the step wise progression is that the last material tied in is the first material wrapped with respect to ribbing. Traditionally, hackle does not start with the first wrap of tinsel, it usually starts at the second. So the first thing we need to do is tie in our tinsel in such a fashion that it will be ready to wrap, once the body is complete and the hackle is in place.

What I have here is Mylar tinsel. It's of a medium width. It is silver on one side and gold on the other, and I think for the purposes of this fly, since I'll be using oval silver tinsel, we'll use the gold to tie in, gold on this body. We'll take the tinsel in and bend it over, and we'll notice that the tinsel now lies on the far side of the hook shank, not completely on the side and not completely on the bottom, but slightly in between.

We'll then take our oval tinsel and as we discussed in the tag section, we'll hold in our tweezers and will bare the core, and we'll bare the core for perhaps an inch.

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I'll bend the core over the tying thread and slide this up so that, that core lies right against the flat tinsel that we've just tied in. And with close turns, touching turns, keeping the thread flat, we'll wrap forward all the way, up the hook shank, keeping the core on the bottom. The flat tinsel will move to the side of the thread, to the side of the hook shank, such that there will be no lumps or bumps there.

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Again, counter twisting the thread in order that it remains flat. And especially for beginning and intermediate Salmon fly tiers, I think the end of the return loop is a good place to have the body end. We can see from here that the return loop of the eye that's tapered into this point and at that point, we'll cut off the thread of the core of the tinsel.

This point, what I'll do now is I'll tie in the floss for the body. Again, we'll use the yellow floss and we'll wrap backward and then forward partway in tying the hackle, and we'll start with the hackle tying shortly.