Against my better judgement, but I hate to see people struggling with relatively simple problems.
Yesterday evening, ( not true now, I wrote this a while ago in answer to a post on another board),I had a gentleman round, who wanted to learn to dress some simple soft hackles, and was in the meantime of the opinion that they were perhaps not quite so "simple" after all!
He had bought a lot of very good stuff, read a few books, etc etc. But he was having trouble getting his spiders ( Soft hackles) to look right.
His main problem was over hackling. He had followed various instructions, heard strict admonitions to only "use one turn", or "one and half turns at most", seen various videos, and been on the web quite a lot as well, but none of the techniques he had seen had produced the required result.
This is not the first time I have had people with such a problem. The answer is very mundane, and quite simple. If you want sparse hackles then only tie in hackles with a few barbs!
If you strip all the barbs off a soft hackle feather, except the eight or so you want to be there, then it is quite impossible to over hackle the fly! Nobody is tempted to wind in empty hackle stem, and so this is not a problem either.
It does not really matter what technique you use, although in order to get a concentric hackle on some flies, you may have to strip one side of the feather, depending on the feather, and the hook size you are using etc. This is because the distance between the barbs is different on various feathers.
In many of the older books, one was advised to "make an extra turn" when using hen hackles. This is because many hen hackles are very thin and "wispy", and are not really suited for dressing sparse spiders. One may however select for thick webby feathers when buying these. Although they are often difficult to find. There are some genetic hen hackles available which are suitable, namely "Brahma" hen hackles from Whiting, and one or two others, but most are not. Ordinary free range barnyard chicken hackles tend to be best. hackles from "industrial" chickens are often more or less useless.
His objection to "wasting" hackle, as a result of stripping fibres, is not a valid argument. There is no point in dressing poor flies in order not to "waste" hackle. Putting two or three turns of hackle on a spider results in a poor fly. IF ONE USES HACKLE STEM WITH ALL THE BARBS!
Of course, such sparse hackles get torn up quickly by the fish, but not least because one catches more fish on them!
Trying to dress several flies from one soft hackle feather, ( genetic hen, and one or two other things excepted), is false economy, and will merely make things difficult.
It can be done of course, nothing is impossible, but it is rarely a good idea, unless you are using fibre bunches from a feather. When winding hackle, prepare it properly before you tie it in. This makes the job a lot easier, and the flies a lot better!
It also obviates the need to remove any excess after you have wound what you need. If you have prepared the feather properly, there is no excess! This tends to make neater and more consistent flies as well.
Should all else fail, then COUNT THE FIBRES! It is no problem at all to count eight fibres on one side of a stripped feather, or indeed count four on each side! Of course, you may use ten or a dozen if you wish, and it suits you. Trout canīt count anyway.
They are however able to distinguish between "enough" and "too much", this is borne out by their well known propensity for ignoring or refusing over hackled flies.
Counting the fibres also completely obviates any problems with "turns" of hackle, or how to apply "half a turn".
This is a nonsense anyway, as there is no way of knowing how many barbs there might be in a "turn" of any particular hackle, dependent as this is on barb spacing which varies from feather to feather, the diameter of the stem, and the diameter of whatever one happens to be winding it around.
As many others have also unsuccessfully tried to point out on occasion, there is no way to apply "half a turn" of hackle, without ending up with a completely unbalanced fly.
With regard to fishing spiders, you may find this useful;
http://www.flyanglersonline.com/feat...dff/part4.html
People also dress spiders etc with weight, gold heads, and what have you. These will catch fish, but are often less successful than the originals when fished properly. There is no harm in experimenting of course.
There are occasions when weighted flies are required for certain techniques.
TL
MC
Advice on tying Spiders
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