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Hey all! I’ve posted a few times recently about my journey into tying winged wet flies. After a few years of dries, nymphs and streamers I thought I’d work on these for a while. From a purely aesthetic point of view winged wets are the prettiest patterns in my opinion. So far I’ve been focusing on two specific flies… a Leadwing Coachman and a Royal Coachman. Tying the bodies is easy enough. Hackle is fairly straightforward unless it’s a throat. That gives me fits. But my main question is about the wings. I have several duck and turkey quills I’m using. Sometimes I get them cut and lined up fairly evenly. Sometimes they’re a little bit off. But what’s really frustrating me is tying them in correctly. I’ve watched dozens of videos where it’s done and think I’m following it fairly well. Once I have them in my fingers at the length I want I use a loose pinch wrap and then pull upwards on the thread binding the feathers to the shank. It does just that. However both feathers almost always end up on one side of the shank or the other… never directly on top. I honestly don’t know what I’m doing differently from the videos I watch. Theirs always look great and uniform and tidy. Mine look okay if you’re looking at it from one side but looks weird from the other. Oh! And some guys online appear to have one feather on each side of the shank when tying them in? For the life of my I can’t figure out how they do that. Anyway… I had to step away for a bit. Almost threw my vice in the dumpster. Ha! I kid. How did you guys learn to do this properly? I must’ve tied 30 Coachmans these past couple of days and maybe only two are acceptable.

I've been working on some wet flies and been having difficulty of setting a good wing. I've been using pheasant tail, you know the smaller ones in a clump. Some come out ok, but most seem to fold up while tightening. Been using text book methods, but wondering if there are better feathers to use for a beginner like me. What I'm looking for is an easy to set feather for classic wet flies mainly around the size of 12. I hear all different types work for wet fly wings, but looking for one that will set the easiest without costing an arm and a leg. color not too important now as I'd rather get technique down before matching colors. Thank you, Jeff