Like the Possum Emerger, it does it all and will catch fish in many circumstances. It’s a great fly to hang a nymph under, such as a 007 for tailing fish and is easy to see in most different types of light.
Don’t be afraid to vary the pattern either, clip the hackle underneath so it sits low, tie it bushy or sparse. Try a hot orange tag or blue wire rib. If you vary it too much you can’t really call it a Zulu anymore but really the basic pattern is all you need.
North Country Spider: Partridge and OrangeNorth Country Spiders – is the name given to wet flies tied in a particular style in the north of England. The Americans refer to them as “Soft Hackles”. They are at the foundation of all North Country fly fishing and are tied intentionally to be very sparse. They have been used for over a hundred years and are tied using simple, traditional, fly tying materials, to represent the full spectrum of insects available to the trout and grayling. There are many North Country Spiders variants that can represent virtually every insect and they have been successfully employed in lakes and rivers in Australia.
Shaun will be leading the tying session…you may recall the informative Loch Style fishing presentation he provided to the club earlier this year. Shaun has successfully employed these types of flies internationally and locally so his tying session is sure to be informative to all levels of fishers. Even if you don’t want to participate in the tie, join us with a single malt or camomile tea for the informative chat.
Tying List:
Hook: Wet Fly, Size 14-18
Thread: Orange 8/0. Traditionally actual tying silk made by Pearsalls. and waxed before use.
Rib: Fine gold wire (very optional). Substitute: You can use what you have in your tying kit
Hackle: Speckled neck feather from an English Partridge. Substitute: similar from a hen cape (rounded and soft)
Alternate ties: With a peacock herl as a thorax or head – behind or in front of the hackle.
Even more alternate ties: With a touch dubbed body.
Secrets he’ll talk about on the night:
– History, 15th Century Italian, 19th Century Yorkshire
– Finding real tying silk without paying $50 a reel on eBay
– How to fish
– Alternate ties
– Herl headed and Thorax spiders
– The Tenkara Tie
10 Soft-hackle Flies You Need to Know • Outdoor Canada
Method:
1. Lightly wax the thread first. Then tie on just behind the eye.
2. Catch in the fine gold wire and hold in-line with the hook shank as you wrap the thread in touching turns.
3. Stop wrapping the thread just short of the bend.
4. Wrap the thread back up in touching turns to just short of the eye.
5. Take the gold wire in open even turns towards the eye to produce 4-6 ribs. Secure the rib with two wraps of thread.
6. Helicopter the surplus gold rib close to the body.
7. Catch in a prepared partridge feather by the tip using only two or three wraps of thread running away from the eye. I’ll explain how to prep a feather on the night.
8. Cut away the feather tip.
9. Using hackle pliers make between one and two wraps with the feather. Be careful to keep the feather from twisting so the feather barbs take position perpendicular to the body. If you stroke the barbs back as you pass the hackle around the shank you will avoid catching any preceding barbs.
10. Make a careful whip finish with three or four wraps of thread. Avoid letting the whip finish flatten the feather barbs.
11. Touch in the head with a couple of tiny drops of head cement.
Thread: 8/0 black or, **any colour depending on what colour people want their fly to be. And maybe a fluro yellow, orange, pink, red acting as a ‘hotspot’ or cheeks. Keep the thread small as the fly is pretty small. 6/0 is ok, but still pretty thick.
Body: Tinsel – Gold, silver, red, copper, blue, green (med) – Whatever colour people like for a body. Any colour thread even!
Body Rib: Small/ med wire – or stripped peacock quill.
Wing: Marabou or rabbit zonka – colour of people’s choice
Cheeks: Jungle cock or medium sized tinsel for cheeks.. Goose biots are very good too. We can even use fluro thread..
Varnish, nail polish or UV resin.. no preference. And BeesWax for thread
Notes/ Tips from JQ: Below are some notes & tips from my experiences. – You might find them useful 1. We often buy tying gear because a recipe insists on something** but we can easily substitute that ‘something’ with an equivalent or like product. Our gear becomes more consolidated, reducing gear that we may only use a couple of times. Our money will go much further allowing you to spend more elsewhere! I will go through some flies where you will use these materials again and again 2. Buy a hank of Flashabou tinsel (Code: 6998) or, Polarflash (Code: 2015) rather than bobbins of tinsel.. Works out much cheaper and you get heaps of colours in your hank of tinsel.. You can use it for cheeks but it is pretty narrow. Buying hanks of flashabou etc. allows you the opportunity to use it in your wooly buggers, humongous, shreks etc, even collars, nymph cases, ribbing etc 3. SPOTLIGHT or Craft stores have Goose Biots and they have like a pack of 10 with 2x red, 2x blue, 2x yellow, 2x white and 2x green? If not, get on to Troutlore.com.au and checkout Rob’s Hareline range 4. Colours/ variants are endless for this fly. If you haven’t got the exact materials we can substitute it and it’ll still be a fish-catcher. We can go through some variants on the night 5. EP Streamer Brush is also very handy – Orange in particular is very productive in local lakes. Check out Craig Dawson write up in the book Australian Trout Flies ‘revisited’. And then the streamer brush is good for cod flies, salt and many other flies 6. UV resin is great for instant completion to your flies, but has a nice price tag and a UV light is required. Most of the time $5.00 Sally Hansens is more than fine and is as robust. Sally Hansens does smell and so do some UV resins. The choice is yours! 7. Jungle cock is difficult to obtain these days (limited supply), suppliers have plastic printed ones. Or we can use tinsel or biots 8. Fish these anywhere in your team of flies. Swing them, Tweak them
Our last virtual fly tying night with Evan from Create-A-Flyhttps://www.createafly.com.auwas so successful that we asked him to host it again on Wednesday 22 April … and he kindly agreed.Evan tied the Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear Nymph which is one of the flies in the Fly Fishers International Bronze Fly Tying Award
The required materials are listed below:
Hook: #10 1X Long Nymph hook, 1xL
Weight: 10-15 turns of non-lead wire
Thread: 8/0 Black Uni-Thread or equivalent
Tail: Guard hairs from hare’s mask
Rib: Gold oval tinsel over abdomen
Abdomen: Blended lighter tan hair from the hare’s mask (or Hairline Dubbing # 4, Hare’s Ear – or equivalent)
Wing Case: Mottled turkey tail feather over thorax
Thorax: Blended darker brown hairs from the hare’s mask (or Hairline Dubbing #5, Dark Hare’s Ear or equivalent
Prepare for the Brogo Dam outing and tie a Cartside Gurgler:
Materials: Mustad C52s, No.2 or equal Bucktail – one or two colours Crystal flash – pearl 2mm closed cell foam, colour of choice Saddle hackle or chenille, colour of choice Flash-a-boo jumbo size silver
John and Claude led the ‘dubbing brush’ session on Wednesday night. Claude had a ‘home made’ dubbing brush maker and John had his fancy vice to demonstrate the creation of brushes on a different device. If you like Claude’s home made maker, he has promised to give those that attend the plans 😊.
Dubbing brushes can be used for a variety of flies from nymphs to buggers and the more talented tiers could use them for salt water flies. Below are some produced by Claude. He says it is quite quick to whip up nymph or bugger if you have a brush that is suitable – he demonstrated a quick bugger tie.
All you need is some copper wire, dubbing material (anything you have) and a bit of imagination to make the brush.
Just got this hint from Shaun. Will pop it into our useful links page in due course:
Bill – I just came a across a series of recently uploaded tying videos from Tassie, tied by Neil Grose. Really good production, and flies you never see in shops or books. Worth sharing as a blog item I would think. Cheers, Shaun.
Shaun has recently been to UK fishing in the Lake District. He extracted some tips that would be quite relevant here. One day I’ll assemble all the tips that people have offered to Burley Line and pop them in this category.
If you’re interested, this trip we fished Lough Corrib, Stocks Reservoir, and the Lake District, where I picked up my first grand slam (Trout, Pike, Redfin) near Lake Windermere. The following are a handful of observations that I picked up this time round.
When fishing at home it’s common to see a three fly setup with increasingly lighter tipper at each fly. Level leaders seem more common in Britain, and the locals were using some of the newer Japanese fluorocarbons in 0.25mm at around 18lb. These leaders are plenty stiff and even with my casting skills, unfurl nicely with the droppers rarely tangling. On the subject of droppers, one of our fellow fishers showed me a technique that I’m definitely trying at home. When you setup at the beginning of the day, you build your leader with the usual three section, two triple surgeon knot rigs. When during the course of a day’s fishing your droppers start getting short, or there’s a tangle that’s beyond help, you cut the dropper close to the knot, and then attach a new dropper with a blood knot, or even a perfection loop using the old knot as a stopper. I’ve even seen a knot tied above and below the old surgeons knot. When using a perfection loop the dropper will slide along the leader, and whilst I didn’t see it in practice, a missed strike with the setup can tell you which fly was hit, as the dropper will slide up snug against the stopper knot.
Flies as always are a contentious subject. Boobies in both floating and sinking forms are ever popular apart from with the purists, but unsurprisingly, the comp fishers are rarely that. Foam arsed blobs (FABs) are also in most fishers boxes, fished as an attractor in a standard sinking setup, commonly with a Damsel that’s similar to a Mel’s damsel on the point, and small dark fly like a cormorant. Alternatively, because the foam variants of the FAB float well, they are used as a point fly to suspend and indicate nymphs or buzzers just under the surface on a floating line. The main change I’ve seen is in the materials used. Regular fritz is being replaced with a jelly fritz, which is translucent when wet, showing through to the thread colour. It’s a trickier material to deal with, and it’s best tied in after a brief soak, but otherwise FABs are easy to tie, and an evening’s work will supply a seasons flies. The most popular of the jelly materials are made by frozen north fishing in dozens of colours. There’s even several greens that would make potential replacements for straggle fritz on a damsel.
The other fly I was introduced to, which has yet to be named as it was an experiment by one of our fishing mates, was a beetle pattern that was simply a tapered ball of spiky black dubbing on a size 14 hook, with a ‘flashback’ made from a strip of heavy duty garbage bin liner. The fish were quite happy to take this, and it sounds like a useful ‘guide fly’ for those of us with neither the skill nor inclination to tie complex flies.
Coloured hooks also seem to be a thing now, with a bare red hook and a small dubbed thorax making for very easy buzzers.
North Country Spiders – is the name given to wet flies tied in a particular style in the north of England. The Americans refer to them as “Soft Hackles”. They are at the foundation of all North Country fly fishing and are tied intentionally to be very sparse. They have been used for over a hundred years and are tied using simple, traditional, fly tying materials, to represent the full spectrum of insects available to the trout and grayling. There are many North Country Spiders variants that can represent virtually every insect and they have been successfully employed in lakes and rivers in Australia.
