Sand Fly

This dressing of Michael Theakston's Sand Fly configures the fly as a hackle and opts for the "yellow bronze brown hen" hackle over the three other alternatives Theakston provides.

Hook:		10-18
Thread:		Orange
Body:		Orange Pearsall's gossamer silk dubbed sparsely with muskrat
Hackle:		Lightly specked, bronzy-yellow hen
		Sand Fly is the name some historical anglers use to identify the Gravel Bed Spider, but it most often refers to a caddisfly or sedge. Leslie Magee notes dressings sedges or caddisflies listed specifically as the Sandfly, Sand Fly, or Sanded Dun in six different angling texts from 1809 to 1916, including George Bainbridge’s The Fly-fisher’s Guide (1816), Alfred Ronalds’ The Fly-fisher’s Entomology (1836), and Michael Theakston’s A List of Natural Flies (1853). Robert L. Smith lists no fewer than ten dressings explicitly named Sand Fly (or an approximate dialectal variation, like Sandflee) in manuscripts and publications dating from 1712 to the twentieth in his North Country Fly: Yorkshire's Soft Hackle Tradition (2015), available from Coch-y-Bonddu Books. Theakston gives a dressing for the Sanded Dun—“dun” is his denomination for sedge or caddis—that uses “bright copper colored silk for body; feathers, for wings and legs, from the landrail, throstle, or a yellow bronze brown hen, or the brown owl, with or without a tinge of water rat.” Bainbridge provides a winged and hackled dressing for the Sand Fly, asserting that it “may be considered as one of the best flies for affording diversion,” since it can be fished “successfully, at all hours of the day, from April to the end of September.” He compares the flies fished on “the borders of Yorkshire, where, as well in Cumberland and Westmoreland, the snipe’s wing and golden plover’s feathers, dressed as hackles, without dubbed bodies are the favourite flies.” Presumably, he means silk bodied dressings. Bainbridge notes that, while such silk bodied flies will work, a dubbed bodied fly will often work better, recalling a afternoon when his dubbed bodied Sand Fly caught twice as many fish as its silk bodied counterpart. For the winged dressing, the “wings are made from the sandy-coloured feather of the landrail’s wing, with a ginger hackled for legs; and the bright sandy-coloured fur from the hare’s neck, mixed with a very small quantity of orange-coloured mohair, for the body; or if dressed as a hackle, the feathers from under the throstle’s wing are the nearestthe colour of the wings of the fly.” Ronalds cites Bainbridge’s description of the Sand Fly and its dressings, adding a “silk of the same colour” as the “sandy coloured fur from the hare’s neck.” He leaves off the orange mohair that Bainbridge recommends. Ronalds also stipulates that the Sand Fly is dressed “buzz,” as a hackle, with a throstle’s undercovert, but he notes that the hackle should be “wound upon the above body.”  In North Country Flies (1886), T. E. Pritt includes the Sandfly, No. 34, which is an almost exact replica of the winged wets Bainbridge and Ronalds list, except that he ribs a sandy body with sandy hare’s fur. John Jackson, likewise, includes a Sand Fly, No. 19 in his Practical Fly-Fisher (1854) that alternates hen pheasant undercovert for the winging, but maintains the body and hackling; E. M. Tod includes this dressing in Table I of the Appendix of his Wet-Fly Fishing (1903). In Modern Trout Fly Dressing (1936), Roger Woolley includes a Sand Fly under the heading of General Wet Flies: Body.—Ginger fur. Hackle.—Ginger hen. Wings.—Starling.