Breaking Off

It was a good run.

If I had had the wherewithal to continue posting through January 2018, Soft Hackles, Tight Lines would have been in operation for four-and-a-half years. My first posting was 3 June 2013. On the whole, the blog has included 110 posts with 106 devoted to a historical account of specific, related dressings, comprising almost 50,000 words and 166 photos of flies I have tied to represent those dressings and, quite often, their variations. While there are many more of flies that deserve to be researched, written up, and tied, the blog has come to occupy more time than I can devote to it now.

It has been a labor of love.

I very much appreciate the readers I have had throughout this project, from the outset to the eleventh hour. A few of my favorite posts are still available at the following links:

Black Spider                                                        Bracken Clock

Syl’s Nymph                                                        Hare’s Ear Flymph

Breadcrust                                                           Starling and Herl

Greenwell’s Glory Hackle                                 Black Louper

Pheasant Tail                                                      Exe Fly 

Small Ant                                                             Light Sedge

Orange Flie                                                          Carrot Fly

Yaller Hammer                                                   Red Fox Squirrel Nymph

            Gray Hackle Peacock                                         Dark Snipe and Green
            Blue Partridge                                                     Stone Fly 

I cannot resist listing some my favorite patterns for fishing on my homewaters in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee, in wide tailraces or the Great Smoky Mountains and the pasture streams of the New River Valley. I have not tried to name the originators of the pattern, only my sources. My additions or alternative materials are listed in parentheses.

A Baker's Dozen:

		1. Dark Snipe and Purple - Lakeland, Brumfitt, Pritt
Hook:		16-18
Silk:		Purple silk
(Rib:		Extra small wine colored wire, optional)
Body:		Tying silk
Hackle:		Snipe covert (or smoky dun starling rump)
		2. Waterhen Bloa - Pritt, Edmonds and Lee
Hook:		14-16
Silk:		Yellow silk
Body:		Muskrat or mole dubbed thinly on tying silk so that tying silk shows through distinctly
Hackle:		Waterhen undercovert (coot undercovert)
		3. Iron Blue Dun - Hidy
Hook:		14-18
Silk:		Red silk
(Rib:		Extra small wine colored wire, optional)
Body:		Dark mole fur spun on red silk to form a taper toward the hackle, with two or three turns exposed at the tail
Hackle:		Starling (smoky dun starling rump or crow covert)
		4. March Brown - Nemes
Hook:		10-14
Silk:		Orange silk (or yellow)
Tail:		Brown Partridge (optional)
Rib:		Extra small flat gold tinsel (or medium gold wire)
Body:		Hare’s mask mixed with hare’s ear (or brownish rabbit shoulder mixed with hare’s mask)
Hackle:		Brown partridge (two-and-half turns, so that slightly more hackle is situated on top of the hook shank, the vaguest suggestion of winging)
		5. Pheasant Tail - Nemes
Hook:		16-22
Silk:		Dark brown thread (burnt orange,  olive dun, purple, etc. - matched to the thorax)
Tail:		Pheasant tail tips, optional
Rib:		Extra small copper wire (or gold, with olive thread)
Body:		Pheasant tail
(Thorax:		Sulfur, olive, purple, etc. superfine dubbing - matched to the thread)
Hackle:		Brown partridge
		6. Light Snipe and Yellow - Leisenring
Hook:		14-16
Silk:		Primrose thread
Rib:		Small gold wire
Body:		Primrose silk buttonhole twist (Coats and Clark’s 72-A baby yellow, size D, for preference)
Hackle:		Snipe undercovert
		7. Black Spider - Baillie, Stewart
Hook:		16-20
Thread:		Dark brown thread
Body/ Hackle:		Starling twisted on brown silk and palmered toward the eye of the hook (or waxed red or claret silk)
		8. Grouse and Orange - Woolley, Nemes
Hook:		12-18
Silk:		Orange silk
Body:		Tying silk
Thorax:		Dark hare’s ear, optional (Nemes’ addition)
Hackle:		Speckled-brown red grouse covert
Tip:		Flat gold tinsel, optional (popular in earlier incarnations of the pattern)
		9. Brown or Gray Hackle - Leisenring
Hook:		10-16
Silk:		Wine silk (or wine thread) or primrose silk (or primrose thread)
Rib:		Extra small flat gold tinsel, slightly tipping the herl body
Body:		Bronzy peacock herl
Hackle:		Red furnace or pale ginger furnace - matched to the corresponding silk/thread color
		10. Orange Flie - Cotton
Hook:		14-18
Silk:		Orange silk (or gold)
Body:		Orange wool (burnt orange angora goat)
Hackle:		Black hackle (webby American crow neck or, for different parts of the season, starling back, nearer the rump)
		11. Rough-Bodied Poult - Edmonds and Lee
Hook:		14-18
Silk:		Primrose silk
Body:		Buff opossum fur dubbed thinly on tying silk so that tying silk shows through distinctly
Hackle:		Young grouse undercovert (bobwhite quail undercovert or, for a lighter fly, mourning dove undercovert)
		12. Red Fox Squirrel Nymph - Whitlock
Hook:		8-16
Silk:		Orange thread
Tail:		Red fox squirrel back fur, optional
Rib:		Gold twist (medium gold wire or small flat gold tinsel)
Abdomen:		Red fox squirrel belly fur
Thorax:		Red fox squirrel back fur
Hackle:		Brown speckled hen, mottled red grouse covert, or brown partridge back
		13. Gray Hackle Red - Hughes
Hook:		10-16
Thread:		Black
Tip:		Small flat gold tinsel
Tail:		Bright, dyed-red hackle fibers
(Rib:		Extra small copper wire, reverse-ribbed)
Body:		Bronzy peacock herl
Hackle:		Stiffer, darker grizzly hen (two turns, no longer than the gold tip)

Thornfly Dun; Landrail Dun; Dark and Light Sedge; or, Silverhorns

This dressing substitutes American woodcock undercovert for landrail undercovert. It is dressed more heavily to align it with William Blacker's Red Palmer Fly, which T. E. Pritt lists as a precedent. It finishes the fly in front of the head rather than behind it. 

Hook:		14-18
Thread:		Orange
Body:		Orange silk
Hackle:		American woodcock undercovert
Head:		Peacock herl
		Two distinct strains of dressing the Thornfly Dun seem to exist. Drawing the connection between these two pattern groups makes two assumptions: first, that the name Thornfly (in whatever form) corresponding with a hatching period beginning in late May or early June correlates different representations; second, that these dressings are, as the name dun often seems to distinguish, caddis or sedge flies. The more popular dressings exhibit a general orange-red cast in the bodies, hackles, and heads. They have much in common with the Light Dun that Michael Theakston describes in his List of Natural Flies (1843). However, many of the dressings also emphasize a darker overall color, with purplish black bodies and darker dun-colored hackles. Dressings for this June hatch have more in common with the Silverhorns sedge that Alfred Ronalds lists for June fishing in The Fly-fisher’s Entomology (1837).  In the former category is the Thornfly Dun, no. 49, that T. E. Pritt includes in Yorkshire Trout Flies (1885) and its 1886 reworking, North-Country Flies: “Wings.—Hackled with a Landrail’s feather, taken from under the wing. Body.—Orange silk. Head.—Peacock herl.” Pritt notes that the Thornfly Dun is “a very excellent fly in a good bold brown water on warm days in summer, from June onwards. It is a variation of No. 5 [the Brown Owl], and equally useful. Dressed with a redder feather it is the same fly as that known as Blacker’s Red.” After Pritt, Harfield Edmonds and Norman Lee seem to offer two variations on the Thornfly Dun for June sedge dressings. They recommend, like Pritt, their Dark and Light Sedges for fishing from the “middle of June to the end of the season.” Despite the reference to Blacker, Pritt’s Thornfly Dun seems more aligned to manuscript dressings like Large Thorn Fly Dun recorded by Jonathan Pickard in 1820 and printed by Robert L. Smith in The North Country Fly: Yorkshire’s Soft Hackle Tradition (2015): “Orange silk, peacock harl in the head feather from the inside of a landrail’s wing.” Smith also prints another 1820 list by William Robinson with an almost identical dressing for the Thorn Dun Larger or Landrail Dun.

This dressing uses gold Pearsall’s gossamer silk, substitutes a mixture of ginger antron and orange acrylic for orange mohair, and applies gold twist rather than tinsel.

Pritt’s attribution to Blacker’s Red is presumably to the Red Palmer Fly that William Blacker includes in his Art of Angling (1843). The color scheme falls into the tawny category, essentially the same as Pritt’s Thornfly Dun, except that Blacker's fly is dressed as a palmer: “Hook ff.—Body, Red or orange mohair, with gold twist or tinsel up the body. Legs, Two red hackles, wound on from the tail up to the head, in rotation with the tinsel.” Blacker’s Red Palmer is the same as the Red Palmer that John Kirkbride includes in his Northern Angler (1837), except that Kirkbride recommends occasionally using gold wire as a rib.

This dress of James Chetham's Thorn-Fly dresses a winged fly into a soft hackle, using dove covert for the light gray mallard's wing.  It uses a mixture of black antron and raw Black Welsh Mountain wool for lamb’s wool.

In the latter, darker category of Thornfly dressings is James Chetham’s Thorn-Fly. In his Angler’s Vade Mecum (1681), Cheatham includes “Another Catalogue, of Flies, practiced by a very good angler,” in addition to the list he reprints from The Complete Angler (1657, 1676), that includes the Thorn-fly as the first choice for May. Chetham’s dressing calls for a “Dubbing of Black Lambs Wooll, and Dub’d with Black Silk, Wings of a Mallards light Grey; Note that all the Feathers got from Mallards for Wings, ought be got from a wild Mallard, and not from a tame one.” Stephen Braithwaite maintained a manuscript fly list, which includes a Thorn Fly dressed like Chetham’s, that Robert L. Smith reprints. Chetham’s early dressing seems to provide a precedent for the Alfred Ronalds’s Silverhorns a century and a half later. Ronalds notes that the Silverhorns “is extremely abundant upon some waters, and is well taken both by the Trout and Grayling until the end of August throughout the day, and principally in showery weather. The figure represents the female. The male has black horns.* IMITATION. Body. Black ostrich herl tied with black silk, and dressed off. Wings. Feather from a wing of the cock blackbird. Legs. Small black cock's hackle. Horns. Grey feather of the mallard. To make it buzz, the body is ribbed with silver twist upon the black ostrich herl, and a black hackle wrapped all down. * There is a variety upon some waters, which has a very shining highly polished jet-black wing.”

Stone Fly; Stone Flye or Flie; and, the Montana Stonefly

This dressing of the Stone Fly that Richard Bowlker describes in The Art of Angling (1757) departs from the general rule of the blog and uses a size 10 hook instead of a size 14. It also substitutes a blend of beaver fur and golden stonefly antron dubbed on rib of silk buttonhole twist, which, when wet, would be an apt substitute for Bowlker's “body with dark brown mohair, mixed with dirty yellow.”

Hook:		6-10
Thread:		Wood Duck
Body:		Silk button hole twist – Belding-Corticelli 3715 bamboo, size D
Rib:		Silk button hole twist – Belding-Corticelli 3715 bamboo, size D dubbed with an equal blend of beaver fur and golden stonefly antron
Hackle:		Grizzly cock
		In a discussion of stoneflies in his Fly Fishing: The North Country Tradition (1996), Leslie Magee suggests that “of all the flies imitated by the flyfisher, the larger stoneflies are the least familiar; few of the that I meet on the riverside have ever handled a ‘creeper’ (the nymph or larvae) or an adult stonefly,” and that bait fishing with the stonefly was more common. While the popularity of bait fishing with the stonefly has passed, Magee points out that it was still popular in T. E. Pritt’s time, “when fishing the live creeper and the adult stonefly cast upstream was all the rage on several North Country rivers.” Despite Magee's assertion that the popularity of bait fishing with stoneflies had waned by the early twentieth century, Harfield Edmonds and Norman Lee devoted a chapter to it in their Brook and River Trouting (1916); “20 years after the publication of Brook and River Trouting upstream fishing with the creeper and live stonefly was virtually extinct” due to developments in angling gear and fly fishing methods. Nevertheless, historical angling authors give testament to Magee’s assertion that fishing stone flies as bait was a centuries old practice, much like fishing nymphal and mature Green Drakes. John Kirkbride, for instance, expresses this preference in his Northern Angler (1837): the Stone Fly, “on a hot day, is a most destructive bait for trout,” and it “is seldom used as an artificial fly; for it is best to dab with it after it takes wing. It is here called the May-fly.” Michael Theakston likewise notes in his List of Natural Flies (1843), that the stone fly, the “Imperial Empress of all trout flies,” is “in general fished natural.” “After sunset she comes out,” he notes, “for her enjoyments are chiefly in the dusk and twilight of night and early morn; the whole family are then in motion—flying about—running among the stones, and paddling upon the waters.” Theakston explains that, to fish the stone fly successfully, the angler must “move, unseen, with easy motion up the stream, and dab the fly with precision on the eddies behind stones, or other places of succour where the trout takes his station; or let it glide free and natural down the current over his likely haunts; never drag it against the stream (unnatural for any fly) or suffer it to drown; but succour and recover it by easy lifts and gentle jerks, to keep it on the water alive and dry, for a dead fly hanging at the hook like a piece of wet moss, will not be taken on the top.” Theakston regards fishing the stone fly as an artificial as “a true trier of skill, and probably the best test of the general merits of the flyfisher. Each rustic craftsman along the banks of the winding streams, where the true art and science of flyfishing is best known and practised, greet with glee the presence of the stone fly.” In the third edition of his Modern Trout Fishing (1950), some twenty-five years after bait fishing the stonefly went extinct, in Magee’s account, Roger Woolley emphasized how often the stone fly is fished as a natural, noting that “it is more used in its natural state than as an artificial. It is called the Mayfly on the north country rivers, where it hatches out in great numbers.” Woolley points out that “it is not always easy to procure a sufficient number of the natural flies for a day’s fishing, and then the artificial has to be resorted to, but the stone fly anglers prefer the natural fly is procurable.” He goes on to list eighteen dressings for smaller stoneflies, including five soft hackles like the Winter Brown that he attributes to the North Country tradition. Although Woolley’s dressings are almost evenly split between winged and corresponding hackled versions, historical stone flies patterns were most often winged dressings. John Jackson’s Practical Fly-Fisher (1854) includes a winged stone fly, no. 32, the May-Fly, but notes that the fly is “generally fished natural, being large enough to swim a good sized hook, or two smaller ones tied double.” Theakston’s dressing is also winged, as is the Stone Fly that William Blacker includes in his Art of Angling (1843). Kirkbride, Alfred Ronalds in The Fly-fisher’s Entomology (1837), and John Turton’s Angler’s Manual (1836) provide dressings that seem to derive from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antecedents that John Waller Hills describes in A History of Fly Fishing for Trout (1921). Hills lists the Stonefly as one of the twelve most important flies to anglers, giving a brief account of early dressings from Dame Julianna Berner’s A treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle (1496) to Charles Cotton’s 1676 additions to Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler (1657). Hills points out that the Stonefly “has changed neither in name nor in dressing. It is quite unmistakeable, a fat, stupid, clumsy clown, better at running than flying. The Treatise is as follows: ‘The stone fly, the body of black wool and yellow under the wing and under the tail, and the wings of the drake.’ Markham as usual makes the dressing more definite: the yellow under wings and tail is to be made with yellow silk and the wings are of a drake's down, not the quill feather. Cotton knew the fly well and gives an excellent account of its history: he made the body of dun bear's hair and brown and yellow camlet well mixed, making your fly more yellow on the belly and towards the tail, two or three hairs of a black cat's beard for tail, and long, very large wings of grey mallard. Though we use different furs from Cotton, his body survives unchanged in essence: but a hen pheasant's quill feather makes a truer wing than light mallard, and we like to add a hackle, either blue dun or greenish. But the changes are immaterial.” Part of the “excellent account” that Hills attributes to Cotton includes a description of the Stone-Flies’ unique manner of hatching and eagerness of the trout to feed on them: “This same Stone-Flie has not the patience to continue in his Crust, or Husk till his wings be full grown, but so soon as ever they begin to put out, that he feels himself strong (at which time we call him a Jack) squeezes himself out of Prison, and crawls to the top of some stone, where he can find a chink that will receive him, or can creep betwixt two stones, the one lying hollow upon the other (which, by the way, we also lay so purposely to find them) he there lurks tills his wings be full grown, and there is your only place to find him (and from thence doubtless he derives his name) though, for want of convenience, he will make shift with the hollow of a Bank, or any other place where the wind cannot come to fetch him off.” Cotton notes that anglers often “dape or dibble” the natural Stone-Flie, “as with the [Green] Drake” and that fishing the fly is “much better toward 8, 9, 10 or eleven of the clock, at which time also the best fish rise, and the latter the better, provided you can see your Flie, and when you cannot, a made Flie will murder.” In his Fly Fisher’s Guide (1816), George Bainbridge nods toward three traditions of fishing the stone fly. Not only is it “a deadly bait, used in the natural state,” but it is dressed after the fashion of Cotton's and Berners' precedent, winged and with a bear fur body. Brainbridge notes that it is also dressed as a hackled pattern, with “a long-fibred grizzled hackle from a cock’s back, without wings.” This latter dressing specifically recalls the Stone Flies of Richard Bowlker and his son Charles. Richard Bowlker provides a simple, soft hackle dressing for the Stone Fly in his Art of Flyfishing (1757). He describes the insect as “a large four-winged fly; bred from an insect in the water, called the water cricket; to be found in stony, gravelly brooks, or rivers; his belly is of a dirty yellow, his wings of a fine blue color, full of small veins, so that he is best made with a fine blue grizzle cock’s hackle; the body with dark brown mohair mixed with a dirty yellow.” Charles Bowlker offers a similar dressing in his 1776 edition, though its description reads more like a palmer: “This fly is made of the brown feather of a hen. His belly is of a dirty yellow and his back of the dark brown. His body is made of a yellow or brown spaniel’s hair, or Mohair, with the grizzled hackle of a cock around it.”

Breaking with the usual size 14 hook size for the blog, this dressing uses a 4x bait hook. It substitutes a cree hackle for the brown and grizzly hackles Charles Brooks requires.

Stonefly dressings are the stock-in-trade of modern American anglers, though they are often involved dressings. A notable exception is Charles Brooks' Montana Stonefly nymph. Brooks famously dressed heavily-weighted nymphal patterns “in the round” for fishing deep, boulder-studded pocket water of the western trout streams he favored—much like the water Theakston and the Bowlkers reference—and he described his methods of fishing and dressing them in Nymph Fishing for Larger Trout (1976). Though it is a bit of a stretch, many, such as his Montana Stone Fly, are essentially soft hackles or flymphs, not far removed in form the Hare's Ear Flymph that Dave Hughes describes in Wet Flies (1995). This fly recalls the Bowlkers own dressing, though it is unlikely Brooks had access to their books. Brooks dressed his Montana Stone on long, heavy wire hooks in sizes 4 to 8 and weighted them heavily in order to represent the “Pteronarcys genus of stoneflies, especially P. californica,” also known as the Giant Salmon Fly Nymph, a must different stone fly than the one Alfred Ronalds describes: a fly hatching from “the beginning of April until the end of May,” of the “Order, Neuroptera. Family, Perlidœ. Genus, Perla. Species, Bicaudata.” Ronalds' stonefly is likely much more closely related to the fly Ernest Schwiebert describes in Nymphs (1973) as Perla Capitata, the Great Stonefly Nymph, Art Flick's Stonefly Creeper. Brooks’ Montana Stone is somewhat more complicated to dress than the Bowlkers: “Tail: Six fibers of raven or crow primary. Rib: Copper wire. Body: Black fuzzy yarn, four strand. Hackle: One grizzly saddle and one grizzly dyed dark brown. Strip hackles off lower hackles before tying in. Gills: Light gray or white ostrich herls. Thread: Black nymo 3/0.” Brooks directs fly tiers to: “Tie in thread at front, wind to bend. Lacquer shank. Tie in tail fibers and split to form forked tail, three fibers per side. Tie in ribbing and yarn. Wind thread forward, half hitch twice, and break off. Lacquer shank again. Wind yarn to eye, back to bend, forward to eye and back to base of thorax. Tie off, tying in thread at same time. Wind rib and tie off. Tie in one strand of ostrich herl, and both hackles by the butts. Strip fibers off lower side of both hackles. Wind two separated turns of hackle, one at the base of the thorax and another halfway between there and the eye. Both colors of hackle should lie one against the other. Tie off. Wind ostrich herl forward at the base of the hackles, tie off. Spiral thread forward and finish head large and lacquer well.”