A Favourite Fly

Many years ago when I was young, and coincidently there were more trout, I read a book from the East Kilbride Library called ‘Let’s Fish the Clyde’. In it there was a list of author Bert Sharpe’s favourite Clyde style flies.

 

Now as we all know (though maybe not) Clyde style flies epitomise the minimalist look which now finds favour on still waters with ever more sparse buzzer patterns. Unfortunately for our cutting edge fishers Clyde styles have been tied for over a century. The sparseness of the clyde style fly really appealed to me, not just because I was told by those in the know when fishing the Clyde and Avon, but also you could get an awful lot of flies from a minimum amount of material (even at the tender age of sixteen I was a bit grippit!!).

He listed wets, dries, nymphs and night flies to be used in season. One fly which particularly caught my eye in amongst the list of wets was a fly called the Teal & Black, due in no small part to the novel way in which he tied in the teal wing. Tying a teal feather on a size 10 Peter Ross – everyone’s favourite wet – can be tricky, let alone sparsely on a size 14 or 16 fine wire hook but Bert’s method solved that beautifully.

In this you do not cut slips from matching feathers or roll/fold a wing from a section of feather but proceed as follows :

 

 

 

 

Strip the flue from the bottom of the feather

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stroke the fibres at the front of the feather forward

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continue this working back to the feather tip till you
have enough fibres for a slim wing

 

 

Place the feather on the top of the hook, with the point
where you have stroked the fibres forward above the thread

 

 

 

 

 

Then wind 2 turns of thread to secure the feather

 

 

 

Now pull the feather forward keeping light tension on
the thread until the wing is the correct length

 

 

 

Finally secure with more turns of thread, trim away
the waste and whip finish

 

 

 

The finished fly can be fished early season on the Clyde or any rivers as recommended in Bert’s book, or at any time of the year and I have found it to be effective on still waters, for both brownies & rainbows, particularly in the evening when buzzers are hatching.

 

Peter McCallum has fished for nearly 40 years, almost always for trout and is a passionate fly tier. Peter is keen to pass on his love of fishing to others, and has qualified as a GAIA trout fishing coach and APGAI fly tier. He is a convert to float tubing on wild lochs even though he claims it makes him look like a mutant goose!