Light Snipe and Yellow

This variant uses embroidery thread in place of buttonhole twist.

Hook:		14-18
Thread:		Yellow
Rib:		Extra small gold wire
Abdomen:		Embroidery thread - DMC 726 light topaz or, better still, silk buttonhole twist – Coats and Clark’s 72-A baby yellow, size D
Hackle:		Snipe from the undercovert feathers or lesser covert feathers James Leisenring included the light snipe and yellow in the book jointly published with Vernon Hidy, The Art of Tying the Wet Fly and Fishing the Flymph (1941)

Or, better still:

This light snipe and yellow is dressed with silk buttonhole twist.

Sylvester Nemes reprints the patterns that T. E. Pritt lists in his North Country Flies (1886). No. 29, the Snipe Bloa, is an almost exact recipe for Leisenring’s Light Snipe and Yellow, except for Leiserning’s addition of a wire rib. “Wings.—Hackled with a feather from the inside of a Jack Snipe’s wing. Body: Straw-coloured silk.” Pritt notes that no. 30, the Snipe Bloa is a good an almost identical dressing: "It is a splendid killer, and many anglers fish if more or less year round. It is Theakston's Bloa brown and is probably to be identified with the Light bloa of Jackson." In his List of Natural Flies (1853), Michael Theakston describes this imitation of the 32nd fly he lists, the Blo Brown: “Snipe blo feather from under the wing; yellow or orange silk, with a few fibers of ambry-brown mohair at the breast.” In his posthumous work, The Practical Fly-Fisher (1854), John Jackson described tying his Light Bloa (No. 49) with “Wings.—Inside of Snipe’s wing feather. Body.—Light drab silk Legs and Tail.—Grizzled Hackle.”

The silk buttonhole twist on this soft hackle comes from The FiniRibbon, an online shop at Etsy. 

Black Spider

The variation of the Black Spider substitutes embroidery floss for the body

Hook:		12-20
Thread:		Black
Rib:		Abdomen floss
Abdomen:		Embroidery thread - DMC 938 dark coffee brown or, better still, silk buttonhole twist – Coats & Clark’s 56-B dark chocolate brown, size D
Thorax:		Optional; beaver and mole
Hackle:		Starling from the shoulder or crow

This spider pictures a mole and beaver thorax with a crow hackle.

Or, better still:

This spider is dressed with a body of silk buttonhole twist.

The variations above are in the vein of the Black Spider that E. M. Tod attributes to W. C. Stewart and James Baillie in Wet-Fly Fishing (1903). Tod draws no distinction between wingless, hackled flies and the dressing that Stewart describes: "When dealing with the fishing of 'Waters' with the wet fly, had I been asked to name one particular class more suitable than any other for this purpose, I should certainly have named hackled flies, the 'Spiders' of Stewart's book."  He equates it with famous soft hackles like the "Water-hen Bloa,' that splendid hackled fly" and "Pritt's 'Dark Snipe and Purple'" which is "another fly of similar characteristics" to Stewart's Black Spider.  W. C. Stewart originally ranked the black spider as the "killing" pattern in his Practical Angler (1857). Stewart’s original recipe for the black spider is simple: “This is made of the small feather of the cock starling, dressed with brown silk.” His dressing, for most fly tiers, seems a bit more complicated than the typical soft hackled fly. Stewart, or rather his editor, illustrates the three styles of dressing he discusses - the silhouette on the left is the spider. The picture is excerpted from page 95 of W. C. Stewart's The Practical Angler, an online text maintained in the Digital Collections of the New Hampshire University Library. Stewart distinguishes the spider from the winged wet fly, since “dressing a spider is a much simpler operation than dressing the fly.” His dressing uses three materials: hackle, waxed silk, and silk gut (more commonly used in Stewart’s time for building leaders than dressing flies): “Before commencing, bite the end of the gut between your teeth; this flattens and makes it broader at the point, which prevents it slipping; a thing very liable to occur with small flies. Next, take the hook firmly between the forefinger and thumb of your left hand, lay the gut along its shank, and with a well-waxed silk thread, commencing about the centre of the hook, whip it and the gut firmly together, till you come to the end of the shank, where form the head by a few turns of the thread. This done, take the feather, and laying it on with the root end towards the bend of the hook, wrap the silk three or four times round it, and then cut off the root end.”   For Stewart, hackling the spider was crucial, as it created both hackle and body and distinguished it from other styles of flies depicted in the illustration above: “still holding the hook between the forefinger and the thumb of your left hand, take the thread, lay it along the centre of the inside of the feather, and with the forefinger and thumb of your right hand twirl them round together till the feather is rolled round the thread; and in this state wrap it round the hook, taking care that a sufficient number of the fibres stick out to represent the legs; to effect this it will sometimes be necessary to raise the fibres with a needle during the operation.” The silk-gut-hackle  twist is wound back to the original tie-in point at the hook’s center, tied off, and half-hitched or whip finished. Stewart characterizes this method of fly dressing as being  very “rough and simple,” but it yields a “natural-looking, and much more durable” fly.

This dressing, truer to James Baillie's and W. C. Stewart's original intent, substitutes brown Pearsall's Gossamer Silk instead of silk gut. It is dressed entirely in the reverse of Stewart's directions: the tip of the feather is tied in at the rear, twisted with the silk; both are wound forward, with the stem of the hackle and silk tied off at the eye of the hook.

In recent years, some fly tiers have offered alternate methods for dressing flies. Dave Hughes adapted the common method of dressing palmered patterns like woolly worm or woolly bugger to dress Stewart’s spiders. Hughes method only requires tying thread and hackle, as he illustrates in Wet Flies (1995). The hackle is tied in like Stewart’s with the tip to the front. The feather is wound back to the hook’s center and tied off; the thread is wound forward through the palmer to reinforce the hackle stem, and the fly is finished at the head.   Either version, the more traditional, front-hackled or partially-palmered versions of Stewart's spider might not follow Stewart's original intention exactly, but both offer a buggy silhouette that would undoubtedly match a hatch of caddis flies, a mayfly rising in fast water, or stonefly caught in the wash of the current. Listing all of the authors after Stewart who recommend his Black Spider (or any of his spiders) would be an effort too comprehensive. The highlights, however, are interesting enough. Stewart’s Scottish spiders are noticeably absent from T. E. Pritt’s North-Country Flies (1886), but another Scottish author, E. M. Tod, highly recommends them in his Wet-Fly Fishing Treated Methodically (1903). While spiders and Stewart’s method of fishing them upstream certainly have an influence on G. E. M. Skues, Skues does not cite Stewart Spiders. James Leisenring, however, wholeheartedly recommends them in The Art of Tying the Wet Fly and Fishing the Flymph (1940): “I have found W. C. Stewart’s spiders to be a deadly combination on every stream I have ever fished. If a fly fisherman presents them carefully, he can soon acquire the reputation of a fish hog! . . . After tying in the hackle by the stem, Stewart put the tying silk against the stem on the inside of the hackle, twirled them together slightly, and then wound them about the hook shank together.”

A Very Necessary Definition and a Modus Operandi

The Necessity of Definition

As a style, soft-hackled flies have a longer lineage than any other type of pattern. Its dynamic historical scope complicates any attempt at a static definition. Flies that would be recognized as the close relatives of soft hackles today appear in angling literature as old as Juliana Berners’s A treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle (1496), which lists the twelve "flyes wyth whyche ye shall angle to y^e trought and grayllyng," and featured dressings that clumped hackle on the top of the shank. Dressed without the convenience of modern fly tying tools, like a vice, these wings would undoubtedly have splayed loosely around the sides on the drift. Not until the twentieth century, more than four hundred years after Berners described flies tied with clumped bird hackles, did the soft-hackle style take on the name anglers know today. According to Sylvester Nemes, the English angler E. M. Tod was the first to dub the style the “soft hackle” in 1903, and only in the latter part of the twentieth century did the soft hackle begin regaining some of its former popularity, resuscitated by the likes of W. H. Lawrie and Sylvester Nemes. That the soft-hackle style could have existed so long with so little definitive explanation suggests a pattern type that was simply understood as such—“what is a soft hackle?” an angler might ask, and by this traditional logic, “why a soft hackle, of course!” would be the only answer necessary. Having become so familiar a style, the soft-hackled fly’s definition had been reduced to assumption. But the province of the soft-hackled fly time out of mind was the North Country and the swift streams of the Scottish angler. W. C. Stewart’s Scottish treatise, The Practical Angler (1857), terms the pattern "spider,  In common, historical usage it was merely the "hackle fly" or "hackles" to distinguish it from "winged flies," both of which North Country anglers listed among their dressing. Anglers had traditionally - but not universally - reserved Stewart's general "spider" for imitative midge dressings. Twenty years before Stewart, John Kirkbride referred to some his wingless wet flies as spiders in The Northern Angler (1837). If nothing else, terms like hackle, spider, and soft hackle highlight a crucial attribute of the style: the prominence of the hackle in relation to the rest of the pattern. 

Unlike the soft hackle, the names of most fly styles designate the position of the insects they imitate within the water column. The dry fly, emerger, or nymph denominates an imitative function in the pattern style, the maturity of the insects in relation to their distance from the water’s surface. Streamers are a bit different. Their name indicates that they undulate or stream out beyond the bend of the hook in imitation of a fish, crawfish, salamander, or even a larger nymph. Like the dry fly, emerger, and nymph, however, the streamer’s denomination suggests a specific, imitative functionality. Soft hackles, on the other hand, derive their name from a single part of the fly alone, the prominent, spider-like hackle. The name makes no reference to the style’s position in the water or its imitative qualities, which are indicative of the pattern’s versatility. T. E. Pritt's North-Country Flies (1886) is the standard primer for soft hackles, and he notes that "it is far more difficult to imitate a perfect insect and to afterwards impart to it a semblance of life in or on the water, than it is to produce something which is sufficiently near a resemblance of an imperfectly developed insect, struggling to attain the surface of the stream. Trout undoubtedly take a hackle fly for the insect just rising from the pupa in a half-drowned state; and the opening and closing of the fibres of the feathers give it an appearance of vitality, which even the most dexterous fly-fisher will fail to impart to the winged imitations." Since it can be fished just under the surface as an emerger or even near the stream’s bottom as a nymph, and anywhere in between (as well as on the surface, with a bit of finesse), the soft hackle cannot be confined to a name that limits its functionality to a specific position in the current or moment in the hatch.

In order to better define the novelty of his own pet style, the nymph, G. E. M. Skues contrasted nymph with the traditional soft-hackle. In his Nymph Fishing for Chalk Stream Trout, the soft hackle is not a nymph, but rather a fly “with long hackles . . . fished dragging downstream so that the hackles closely clasp the body.” The modern dean of the American soft hackle, Sylvester Nemes, defines the style in The Soft-Hackled Fly as “a class of wingless, subaqueous flies, the hackles of which come mostly from birds such as partridge, woodcock, grouse, snipe, and starling.” Each focuses on the material form of the soft-hackled fly and, fittingly, only the hackle itself. A more comprehensive sense of the soft hackle is evident in Vernon S. Hidy’s attempt to conflate the range of wet fly patterns his mentor James Leisenring tied to imitate the insects of Pennsylvania’s limestone streams. Hidy called it the “flymph,” which is “a wingless, artificial fly with a soft, translucent body of fur or wool which blends with the undercolor of the tying silk when wet, utilizing soft hackle fibers easily activated by the currents to give the effect of an insect alive in the water.” While it deemphasizes the soft hackle—the notion of a flymph presumes, after all, to redefine the nature of the soft-hackled fly—Hidy’s definition asserts a specific purpose and function for the material form that other definitions leave off.  

The best definition of a soft-hackled fly begins with the namesake hackle, as in Skues and Nemes, and develops a fly around it, like Hidy.

A Definition of the Soft-Hackled Fly

The soft-hackled fly is identified by the prominence of its hackle, which is selected for its ability to suggest the dominant patterns in coloration of the insect it imitates and for the characteristic softness of its fibers.  Softness in such fibers refers to three crucial attributes: a yielding pliability, greater width, and absorptive quality. Most commonly, soft hackles are taken from landbirds, but may also be taken from poultry, including hen and some cock hackles All other parts and attributes of the soft-hackled fly are subordinate to the qualities of the hackle itself. Since the hackle is always wound sparsely at the the head, soft-hackled fly bodies are correspondingly thin and also color coordinated to match the hackle in imitating a particular insect. Soft-hackled fly bodies aim for translucence and are generally muted in color. They may be divided into an abdomen and thorax, but also, more traditionally, a herl head, often peacock but occasionally magpie. The soft-hackled fly is sometimes ribbed and sometimes tipped or will have tails, but it will never have wings (even though historical treatments of the North Country soft hackle will often include winged and hackled patterns side-by-side).

A Rationale

Like the best artificial flies, a soft-hackled fly creates the effect of a unified, whole insect suggestively. In the soft-hackled fly, this effect results from the dominance of the soft hackle, which suggests the primary attributes of the insect to be imitated, whether they are the wings or the legs or even the body of the insect, when the soft hackle is pressed back against the body of the imitation by the pressure of a swift current. The remainder of the fly complements the hackle to suggest the lesser prominent attributes of the insect.

In its simplest and most utilitarian form, a soft hackle will always be comprised of at least two parts: the definitive, soft hackle itself and the thread that secures this hackle to the hook. A soft hackle in the Scottish or Yorkshire tradition, for instance, is little more than a silk thread body and a landbird hackle. The softness of these hackles results from fibers that are wider and much more pliable than those of dry flies. As a result, they are more absorptive than other types of feathers, rendering the fly easier to fish below the surface, matching the emergent forms of nymphal or pupal insects. The classic soft hackle was tied almost exclusively with hackles from landbirds since they were often softer and of a more varied coloration than poultry hackles. These landbird hackles popularly include the English or French partridge, starling, English red grouse, American grouse, woodcock, snipe, jackdaw, but in the American tradition can also include crow, mourning dove, bobwhite quail, and others. Yet poultry feathers, particularly from hens and the softer Indian rooster necks, also have a similar pliability and absorptive quality.  To better imitate aquatic insects and to enhance the qualities of pliability and absorption, these hackles are wound onto the hook sparsely. By this logic, a fly palmered with a soft poultry hackle might technically be considered a soft hackle, but no one would ever try to argue that a Woolly Worm or Woolly Bugger is a soft hackle. In most cases, a soft-hackled fly is hackled just behind the eye of the fly, at the forward terminus of the thorax, or at most in the front third of the hook shank. The placement of the soft hackle suggests the dominant attributes of the insect, usually its wings and legs or the overall effect of the insect’s combined attributes.

Since the name of the style establishes the dominant trait of the fly, all other parts must be secondary to that material trait, a soft hackle. Thus a soft-hackled fly will not have a wing of paired quill sections or other materials, as they would dominate the fly and overpower the hackle. In addition to its hackle, a soft-hackled fly will have a sparse body and tails, on occasion. As the parts of the soft-hackled fly complement the hackle itself, the body should be thin and less likely to distract from the hackle; soft hackle bodies should be relatively drab to coordinate with the hackle itself and should have a translucency that suggests the body of the insect.

The South Fork of the New River

The Modus Operandi

A blog dedicated to tying soft-hackled flies ought naturally to follow as simple a pattern as the simplicity of the patterns it catalogs. So will it be with this blog: each biweekly posting will provide a recipe for a particular soft-hackled fly and a corresponding picture. In some instances, postings will also include recipe variants and pictures, but the posts will include little to no commentary beyond acknowledgement of the pattern’s creator, whenever it is available. Principally, this blog will be an online pattern book, and my dressings true to the spirit of the original flies, even if they do not follow the recipe verbatim. For instance, I use regular tying threat, cotton embroidery thread, silk buttonhole twist, or the more traditional Pearsall's gossamer silk or marabou silk variably, to create different effects. Likewise, I substitute modern, legal equivalents like hen back or starling for the owl eyebrows and songbird coverets of older recipes.

For the sake of consistency, all soft-hackled flies pictured on this blog have been dressed on straight shank dry fly hooks in size 14. In tying for my fly box, however, I generally reserve this sort of hook for bodies tied with quill, feather or biot. A curved, wide-gap dry fly hook often works best, though not exclusively, for thread, silk, tubing, or dubbed body flies.

The patterns for the patterns depicted here come largely from the following texts:

Sylvester Nemes
     The Soft-Hackled Fly Addict (1981)
     The Soft-Hackled Fly (1975, and esp. 2^nd ed. 2006)
     Two Centuries of Soft Hackles (2004)

Nemes’s texts, especially Two Centuries, have been invaluable in locating historical texts that list traditional soft hackle patterns and, in some cases, providing recipes from those texts.

Also,

     Leslie Magee - Fly Fishing: The North Country Tradition (1994)
     Dave Hughes - Wet Flies (1995), and the second edition (2015)
     Robert L. Smith - The North Country Fly: Yorkshire's Soft Hackle Tradition (2015)

·  Dame Julianna Berners—A treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle (1496)

·  Charles Cotton—The Compleat Angler (1676 fly fishing additions to Izaak Walton’s original text)

·  Richard (father) and Charles (son) Bowlker—The Universal Angler; or, The Art of Angling Improved (Nemes credits the book for staying in print from 1747-1824, but Richard Bowlker's first edition was published in 1758 and Charles Bowlker's in 1774 as The Art of Angling, and Compleat Fly-Fishing. )

·  John Turton—The Angler's Manual; or, the Fly-Fisher's Oracle (1836)

·  John Kirkbride—The Northern Angler (1837)

·  Michael Theakston—A List of Natural Flies that are taken by Trout, Grayling, & Smelt in the Streams of Ripon (1853)

·  John Jackson—The Practical Angler (1854), published posthumously

·  W. C. Stewart—The Practical Angler (1857)

·  T. E. Pritt
     Yorkshire Trout Flies (1885)
     reprinted as North-Country Flies (1886)

·  E. M. Tod—Wet-Fly Fishing Treated Methodically (1903)

·  Harfield H. Edmonds and Norman N. Lee—Brook and River Trouting (1916)

·  G. E. M. Skues
     Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream (1910)
     The Way of a Trout with the Fly (1921)

·  James Leisenring and Pete Hidy—The Art of Tying the Wet Fly & Fishing the Flymph (1941); generally referenced in this blog as James Leisenring’s book since he provided the dressings

·  Roger Woolley—Modern Trout Fly Dressing (1950)

·  Allen Mcgee—Tying and Fishing Soft-Hackled Nymphs (2007)

According to Nemes in Two Centuries of Soft Hackles (2004) and Ernest Schwiebert discussion of the development of nymphal imitation in Nymphs (1973), the following are also worth review for their treatment of soft-hackled flies:

·  John Younger—River Angling (1840)

·  William Blacker—The Art of Fly Making (1843)

·  David Webster—The Angler and the Loop Rod (1885)

·  John Waller Hills
     A History of Fly Fishing for Trout (1921)
     The River Keeper (1934)