Pheasant Tail Colors

[Chris_NH 0]

I have numerous colors, but if you start with natural, olive, yellow and maybe a dyed dark brown you'll have what you need for virtually everything.

[Dave G. 0]

As mentioned already , I have a few in natural . They range in tone, from a tan-ish color to a darker tan or almost brown. However, I probably can count on my two hands how many flies I've tied with pheasant tail in 30 years. It's not my favorite material at all. I keep shoving the bags of them around in my tying case though. It deteriorates in flies that are heavily used, it's pray to toothy salmon etc. And other flies have worked as well if not better than the patterns I used pheasant tail in ( in other words I found substitutes that hold together). I just don't find in the end that pheasant tail is a must have material in my tying life. I have it because I thought it was but it turned out not to be the case for me.

[Trampus 0]

Good advice Eric thank you. Well the tails arrived along with some natural Partridge feathers and i tied my first Partridge-Pheasant tail soft hackle. I was using a portable station with pretty bad lighting but the quality of the fly is due to lack of experience not excuses :-)

Someone said once that you are finally good at tying a fly when you've tied 10 dozen of em...well 119 more to go :-0

[Dave G. 0]

Ya know what ? That fly will catch fish, without doubt. Just take your time, follow a video that you trust and pause it as you go along, back it up ,look again etc. Each one will get better.

 

On this fly: The head is crowded and that is the most common mistake of all of us but especially beginner tyers. It will still catch fish. The tie in point of the hackle looks as though you did not clip out the excess. Easy enough fix. The rib is not wound on evenly, which is strictly cosmetic.

 

Most of your fixes are just practice in material handling AND PROPORTIONS or remembering to leave a hook eye distance more when winding everything forward. You will get it and did I mention that this fly will catch fish.

 

FWIW, to this day on elk hair caddis I sometimes crowd the eye. It's an easy pattern to do it with in size 16 because of how you trim off the elk or dear hair. A little longer shank hook in that case helps but then it's approaching a size `14 in so doing. But for the first decade of my tying life I cleaned out every hook eye before tying on a new EHC before I finally caught on ! Part of that though is due to the fact I only tied them two weeks out of a year on our trips to Maine. So hang in there.

[Trampus 0]

Thanks for the encouragement Dave I really appreciate you taking the time to critique my fly. My second one was better than my first but I obviously need more time at the vice and practice working with materials and partridge for sure. Crowded the eye on the second one too but not nearly as bad as the first lol.

[Chris_NH 0]

2 tips to keep from crowding the eye, which have worked for me...

 

1) Have as your end goal on each fly to have a tiny section of bare shank visible on the eye when you're done, like the width of your bodkin needle of the bare shank visible behind the eye at completion. It hardly ever works out that you actually do, but just keeping that in mind as you go keeps you aware of protecting the eye throughout the tying process.

2) Leave your thread hang where you want your wraps of that particular material to stop, and stop when you get there.

 

Another thing that helped me out quite a bit was to have a purpose with every wrap. It's easy to just keep wrapping and think you're making the fly better, but unless there's a specific reason for that wrap of thread you just made, then force yourself to unwrap it. If you get into that habit your flies will get better fast. Unnecessary bulk is your enemy. Go to youtube.com and look for Hans Weillenman's (spelling may be wrong) fly tying channel. He's very good at keeping bulk down and you'll pick up some very good habits from him.

[flytire 0]

^yup^

 

[Dave G. 0]

Thanks for the encouragement Dave I really appreciate you taking the time to critique my fly. My second one was better than my first but I obviously need more time at the vice and practice working with materials and partridge for sure. Crowded the eye on the second one too but not nearly as bad as the first lol.

Pretty much most of us started the same way ! I know I did and as with flytires diagram you find you need that extra space . And as Chris said you end up near the eye in the end but not crowded. You leave room for a whip finish of 3 or 4 turns basically.

 

Watch some Davie McPhail videos, specifically watch how he handles tie in points and advances thread. He is a master at it and I often go to his videos even now for a refresher so to speak.. Even if you aren't tying the exact pattern he is, it is good to see how he handles certain steps.

[NohackleHS 0]

One other (weird) color that I forgot to mention is green. Many years ago when I started tying Sawyer PT's I tied up some green PT's. They look rather unnatural but they worked very well. Not only did I find them effective on my home stream but I was quite successful with them on some really tough spring creeks like Hat Creek (Northern CA) and Silver Creek in Idaho. If fact, my two largest fish from Silver, two 22-inch browns, were caught on green PT's. Along with one of the browns I also caught a 20-inch rainbow on the same fly a few minutes later. So I don't think it was a fluke. In any case, I just thought I'd mention green pheasant tail since no one else has mentioned it and it has been very productive for me.

[Trampus 0]

That's Interesting about the green feathers. As cheap as pheasant feathers are I believe I will order a different color whenever I order supplies online.