redietz

The original feathers, yes. He suggests substitutes for most of them, such as Brahma hen for corncrake, woodcock for cuckoo, hen mallard for curlew. All the substitutes are legal, as I posted in the first place. (Also, coot hunting is legal here, no sub needed.)

Agreed. In fact, I would extend that to all written discourse. If you're sufficiently in control of yourself to be typing, there's no justification for exceptional language.

Which is exactly the point of having certain words "reserved" for those occasions. The use of proscribed words indicates strong emotion. Watching someone decapitated in front of your warrants "OMG!"; seeing a friend with a bad haircut doesn't, and using it for the latter just renders it less appropriate for the former -- "dilutes" as you put it.

Postage inside the US has become quite hit or miss in the last 12 months. I've had faster delivery times from England than from a town a couple of miles away. You could always start a swap.

Contrast indeed. Better known, more concise, and to me at least, far more useful.

Anything written by George Herter is going have lots of opinions.

IRL, conversations drift from topic to topic. It shouldn't be surprising that they do on-line as well.

I believe he was restricting it to hackled mayfly imitations. You can still add "wings" to spinners by simply using longer hackle and trimming top and bottom. (Or use soft hackles with floatant, as I do.) With stonefly and caddis imitations, a hair wing is often part of the what floats the fly, so it's there for a reason other than fooling fish. I often imitate both with either fore-and-aft flies, or bivisibles, neither of which have wings.

The only advantage to wings on a hackled fly is to make it easier for the angler to see. I do often add wings on patterns that traditionally have them for that reason, but most of the dries that I fish are wingless. Offsetting the "easier to see" advantage is that winged flies can land upside down. You won't find any real difference in catch rate.

And it's been like that since at least the 1600's (not just woolly buggers).

There is already a fly with that name, made with stacked maribou: Poodle The shown reminds me of Shenk's White Minnow, but articulated.

From a conversation I had with him at a show, Mr Wulff tied all the Wulff style patterns with a single upright wing when he was tying for himself. The split wing was only because customers wanted it -- it didn't add to the effectiveness of the fly. At the same show, he demonstrated tying a size 28 Royal Wulff without benefit of a vise.

Although there is a lot of good information in that video, there are a few caveats: 1) His explanation of "denier" is wrong. "Denier" is the weight, in grams, of 9000 meters of the thread. So, although it is a real standard, it doesn't really tell you any more about the thickness of the thread than the "aught" system. For any one line of thread from the same manufacturer, 70d is going to be finer than 280d and 8/0 is going to be finer than 6/0, neither tells you much about the relative diameters of thread from different makers, or even different threads from the same maker. 2) What he says about the thread tightening with each wrap, that's only true if the wraps are in clockwise direction when viewed from the hook eye. For a right handed tyer, that's the conventional direction (over and away). If you wrap in the unconventional direction (over and toward you) or tie left handed and wrap over and away, you're untwisting most threads. Of course, once it's completely untwisted, you start twisting in the other direction. 3) Silk threads such as Pearsall's (now Morus) are twisted in the opposite direction than most synthetic thread, so wrapping in the conventional direction for a right hander will untwist the thread rather than tighten it. Also, you need spin the bobbin in the opposite direction to flatten/tighten the thread than he tells you to in the video. Still, it's a very good video.

Yeah. I've often wondered how the guy felt about watching that over and over for decades.

I thought that was pretty clear. The conclusions only apply to a fly with the leader in a vertical position. I don't think he should have used the phrase "dead drifted" at the beginning of the clip, though. The result would probably have been quite different if he had shown what the fly would have looked like when fished from a sink tip line, or even if there had been heavy shot in front of fly.