| 1/ Use
8/0 thread with this fly but be careful when tying
in the deer hair in step two as it is very easy
to break thin thread. Lay a base of thread from
the eye of the hook to a point about one third
the way back down the hook shank as shown. Standard
operating procedure for starting off a fly. Now
grab your deer hair. I like to match the colour
of the deer hair to the body colour but this combination
works well on the Goulburn. |
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| 2/ Select
a small bunch of deer hair. They should be short'ish
at about an inch in length. Stack the tips gently
in your finger tips. Tie in as shown with deer
hair protruding forward. Pinch the hair onto the
top of the hook and start winding level with the
hook point working backwards. Use gentle wraps
first to stop it flaring making the thread bite
into the hair as you move towards the rear of
the hook. |
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| 3/ Trim
the excess being very careful to not cut the thread.
While we had to be careful not to break the thread
in the previous step, cutting it is now the potential
pitfall. Try and get a nice even cut to avoid
unnecessary bulk. Once this is tied in and trimmed
as shown skip the thread back to the rear of the
fly to a point about level with the hook barb.
Because I want a lot of this fly under the water
I wrap back further so that the pheasant tail
when tied in will angle down. |
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| 4/ Select
a bunch of pheasant tail fibres. Three to four
is fine and tie them in as shown. The first turn
should be at the very rear of the hook and you
can then wind forward, binding them down with
every extra turn of thread. This should easily
be done with a minimal amount of turns. When this
is tied in securely simply trim the excess and
move onto the next step.
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| 5/ Ok
dubbing time. I am deliberately non-specific about
the type as the millions of dubbings out there are
confusing to the new fly tier and it is often assumed
that you cannot tie a fly without material x or
y. Well that is garbage. Any natural fur will work
well. If you want a shaggier fly use a dubbing with
some guard hairs in it or a more delicate fly use
a dubbing that comes from the under fur. In this
case I have picked a shaggy dubbing with plenty
of guard hairs. |
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6/ Start
wrapping the dubbed rope of fur up the hook to
build the body. Wrapping in a clockwise direction
if viewed from the front of the hook slowly wrap
and tease the fibres with your spare hand until
you have the start of a nice body forming. While
this is not difficult I have broken this step
down into two parts.
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| 7/ You
can see here the body starting to take shape. The
dubbed rope is not always perfect from the initial
dubbing attempt so play with it as you wrap and
move forward. Thin it out if you need be or add
more where needed. You can even go back and touch
up gaps in the body. As this is a mayfly emerger
we want to mimic the tapered shape of these insects
and therefore we want a body that uniformly goes
from thin to thick over the course of moving forward
along the hook shank. |
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| 8/ When
you reach the wing we want to add a little bit more
dubbing to create the look of the emerging mayflies
thorax. This can be done by adding a little more
dubbing i.e. making the rope thicker or by putting
in more wraps in the same area. This is purely academic
and I use both methods. Once you are pretty happy
that what you see looks reasonably close to this
then you can move onto step 9. |
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| 9/ To
whip finish or not to whip finish, that is the question.
Well not really. Its pretty straightforward. If
you want to waste $40 on a whip finisher then go
ahead. But the end of a biro or similar such instrument
will work just as well. A couple of half hitches
and your flies will be just as strong. I guarantee
the fly will fall apart long before the knots do.
Trout teeth shred flies but they don't have thumbs
and whether you whip finish or half hitch makes
no difference. Just half hitch is the short answer. |
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10/ Here
is the finished fly in all its shaggy glory. Shaggedelic
baby! This is a pattern to imitate mayflies and
can be carried in most sizes and all the major
mayfly colours. Tie them sparser if you are fishing
in smooth water to picky fish. The shaggier the
better if fishing in tassie.
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11/ Again
another useful version is the shaggy one tied
trimmed off. I would fish this version shown with
confidence when fish are chomping emergers on
the Goulburn and feel equally satisfied to use
a larger version in the same colours on the famous
hatch lakes of Tassie's central highlands.
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