Hi! I'm Tim Landwehr from Tight Lines Fly Fishing Company. This month's Fly of the Month is going to be the Grey Leech. With the Spring Creek's season opening right around the corner, figure this will be a great pattern specially with higher water and it just a tremendously good early season fly.

This fly is coming out of Ross Mueller's book, Upper Midwest Flies That Catch Trout. And those of you who don't have this book, it's a really fantastic book and a lot of the flies that we've highlighted in our Fly of the Month are in here. But this particular pattern is illustrated in great detail on page 11 about that particular fly.

The Grey Leech is tied out, as far as materials go, a long shank hook like a 5262 TMC or 5263. The fly itself uses a black glass bead. We use lead wire and I'm typically using 25000's in the lead wire usually about the diameter of the wire to the diameter of the hook itself. The thread because I have a little bit of segmentation in the fly is Uni thread in a 6/0 in black. And finally, and most importantly, we're going to be using wild turkey and it's really important that you use the wild turkey for this fly because it really offers a completely different coloration to it. Very, very natural and very slimy just like a real leech pattern. And if we take a look at using just a normal marabou, just the color difference between the natural grey and metal black or even a died standard marabou can't even come close.

Now when you guys are looking at turkey marabou itself, especially of a wild bird you're going to see a lot of different feather designs. The first feather you're going to have is going to have kind of the tip on it like this. It will have a lot of a lofty, downy material here which is not a useless feather. We can use this to create the fly also. But if you can find real nice selected pieces, now Charlie and I had to shop and found some really prime stuff, you get real lofty, really fuzzy stuff like this. And you'll see the benefit of that as we tie the fly. So let's start tying the Grey Leech.

The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to take the bead, the black bead and I'm going to slip it over the eye of the hook, just to kind of prep that. Okay, I'm going to put a layer of thread on. And I might only put the layer -- thread by air, the thread base on carefully down the hook shank here because I'm going to lead the rest of the fly. I'm going to take the 25000's lead and what I'm going to do is wrap maybe the first half on this fly with the 25000's lead. And we get that lead pretty much right up behind the bead just like you see here, that's going to kind of trap that bead and kind of keep that bead in place, break that off.

Now, just to hold that lead wire in place, what I'm going to do now is just take my thread and run it through that. And what that's going to do is it just going to fix that wire so that's not spinning around the shank of the hook. Then I am going to take my thread, run the thread down the shank of the hook, so it will kind of hang right inline with the barb just like you see here.

Now at this time, I'm going to look for the nicest piece of marabou that I can find, and I've got some really good stuff here. And I'm going to collect this marabou just like this, I'm going to kind of stroke this marabou until I can kind of collect the tips up in a little bunch like that. I'm going to use this with the whole stem I think because this is actually good enough quality piece to do this. I'm going to measure the tail. The tail is going to be the length of the shank of the hook and I'm going to tie that in. In these first couple of wraps, make sure the first couple of wraps are one right on top of one another and notice that those wraps are still in that same spot right at the barb of that hook. And that gives you that nice fluffy tail.

Now, the next part of this fly is we're going to kind of build this up and I don't want to say a leech as an abdomen or a thorax. But if there is an abdomen to the fly, on this fly, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just collect all the materials like this, pulling them forward in a nice spiral palmer, even wraps with this thread. I'm going to bring that up, pretty much right to where the lead is. Now I've got it where the lead is started and I'm going to cut that excess off. Some guys might tie that in, I'm just going to cut it off, so it doesn't get too bulky, too lofty. Then we're getting my thread right to where the lead starts. Make sure it looks good. Yeah, right to where the lead starts.

Now, you hate to waste these prime feathers like these little guys, like this that are all loft. This is a great, great place for a feather like this because what I'm going to do at this point, is I'm going to come in here and I'm going to just clip off some of this material off the side of this feather. Pull out a little bit of the thread here and if you want to use wax, you can. I prefer not to use wax because it kind of makes a little bit too bungee. I'm just going to dub and moisture helps stick it. I'm going to dub that to the thread itself.

Again, it's so important that you use the wild turkey because we've tried died stuff and grays, and it never looks nearly as nice in the water, kind of get that built up. Now, the fly essentially is done. We're going to pull a whip finish, and I am going to whip finish that right behind the weed. Now, the fly is done, but it doesn't look real webby at this point.

So what I'm going to do, set a Popsicle stick with a little bit of a Velcro attached to it and what I'm going to do is just pick this out with that Popsicle stick and this is not an elegant looking fly. There is nothing pretty or precise about the Grey Leech at all. But I'll tell in the water, it's about as good of a fly as you can have because you can fish this off of a shallow riffle, let it drop into a deep pool and just a kind of work it real slow. And it's been one of our most effective early season flies for that. As you can just kind of let that stuff lead back on you and kind of that look out of it. Pick out nay of the stranglers.

And you guys can see how quick -- cut the other pieces up. You can see how quick you can tie this fly. And the advantage is exactly that because we've tied this with some heavier wire to get this down and deep in pools. It's a great pattern. You can tell a couple of dozen of these in a real short period of time. They become relatively disposable to you.

So that's basically the Grey Leech. Come on in the shop and we can get you all setup. And if you have any questions, we will be happy to show you how it's done.