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haziz

"Wingless" Dry Flies?

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2 minutes ago, mikemac1 said:

If you are talking purely about Mayfly duns, you are probably correct, even with attractor patterns.  However, once you need to fish Mayfly spinners, wings are essential.  Additionally its rare to see an adult caddis or stonefly pattern without a wing element.

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.

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2 hours ago, skeet3t said:

Never tied a parachute dry fly. Tried and it was too much trouble. I just watch for the signs of a feeding fish. I have had good luck fishing a dry fly by fishing it downstream. I let it sink at the end of the drift and hold in the current then strip in a couple of feet.

Parachutes are one of my favorite flies to tie. Like any fly, there are shortcuts that make them easier to tie.

Here are two 2 minute parachutes.

 

 

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On our Colorado tailwaters I often fish wingless dry flies. The collar hackle does the trick. 

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I mostly use parachutes and use the post for visibility.   I often use orange, yellow or blue for the post and catch fish.  I have always heard that in smooth spring creek situations more imitative flies matter.  Rough water, rough flies.  My dry flies consist of a parachute Adam's, Elk Hair Caddis, Klinkenhammer special, Royal Wulff,  Stimulator, or a foam creature.  However, I fish subsurface most of the time.   I also agree that presentation is most important, closely followed by size of fly. 

Please show your flies and give us a report.  If you can see them without the wing, I don't think wings will matter much.

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I think that with "standard tied dry's it boils down to - "It's always been done that way." - type reasoning.

Kim

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"Anglers buy the flies not the fish".  There was a time when the only way you could get a fly was to tie it yourself but once fly shops began selling flies many patterns were created to appeal to the angler's eye for obvious reasons.  Over a hundred years the ones that produced became classics.   IMO poorly tied versions of flies will catch as many fish as the "perfect" ones, sometimes more.  Tying a fly as close as possible to the example is the challenging part of the hobby and a source of enjoyment for me.  I take some pride in a box of well tied flies (relative to my skills) but the secret is the fish don't care and close is usually good enough.

Kelly Gallop has a great line- when people ask at his shop "what are they biting on?', he responds "a good drift".

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Going back to Jaydubs post I read an article where underwater photography showed that wings were the first that will be seen on a drifting fly. Like seeing the sails on a ship as t approaches from the horizon. One thing that always makes me wonder is why people go through the trouble of tyings wings only to have them buried in heavy hackle of the same length. To me I always felt and tie my flies so the wing stands out above the hackle. Also consider, one of the deadliest presentations  for many people on smooth water is a well tied no hackle fly with just the body and wings. Even if you can't do the beautiful wings of the true no hackle fly just getting a high floating body and obvious wings seems to work. Here's how I wish I could tie the no hackle but I can't get the wings like that.

 

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Good luck tying that no hackle  ^^^^^^

Unless you get those wing ABSOLUTELY SYMMETRICAL, the fly fly will helicopter when you cast it and your tippet will look like a coiled spring. It is no coincidence that those wings look like the vanes on an wind turbine.

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Here's and interesting take on the no hackle-  Eric says it's the most difficult fly of all of them to tie.  It sure scares me!

 

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Interesting that this thread went from "wingless" dry flies to "hackle-less" winged flies.

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1 hour ago, DFoster said:

Here's and interesting take on the no hackle-  Eric says it's the most difficult fly of all of them to tie.  It sure scares me!

 

I like his idea of reversing the thread to help with the far wing position. That far wing is always the challenge.  Thanks for sharing.

Also it's pretty incredible when you think the Rene Harrop DID make his living tying no-hackles! Or at least that's what he reports in one of his videos, something to the effect that the majority of his commercial tying had been no-hackles. 

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On 3/21/2021 at 7:34 AM, haziz said:

Does the trout care about the Mayfly wing? Do they see it clearly eyeing the fly from below? Do they care?

Obviously I am aiming at simplifying the tying of the fly from both a difficulty and time spent tying each perspective.

Opinions, feedback or banter welcome.

50 years ago, when I was still a kid throwing worms and garlic cheese to bluegills with my dad, in "Selective Trout," Swisher and Richardson claimed that wingless "hackle bush" flies will work during times of low selectivity, like any fly will, but "The real challenge . . . comes when the trout become selective," particularly in streams with slow pools interspersed with riffles or rapids and in streams with uniform flow with unbroken water. They found a no-hackle, wing-only fly works best there.

The 1970's seem to have brought a lot of "fly scientists" to the fly fishing book world... Lots of big (pseudo-?)"scientific studies" by amateur scientists with claims of finding "the answer." This one seems to have withstood the test of time, at least in the mind of those who still swear by the no-hackle.

I will say that for me, personally, on those types of streams I've found a hackle-only fly works best as a searching pattern, and that during emergence other styles typically do much better. 

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