I have been telling myself I was going to try an Atlantic Salmon Fly for some time now. After looking around for Christmas flies because of another thread, I saw some pretty Christmas Salmon Flies and decided that it was now or never. I dug through my materials and came up with this for my first attempt at a full dress salmon fly.
After fighting the topping for 3 hours, I found the tutorials on the FAOL website and proceeded to cuss myself soundly for not looking to begin with. I see things that need work, like positioning of the topping and tail, the hackle is a tad rough and the head is too big, but I am satisfied with it as a first attempt and my wife thinks it’s pretty.
It was frustrating as all get out, but a lot of fun.
Nicely done indeed! That’s a handsome fly but when I was asking about Christmas fly recipes I was looking for something that is tied like a fly but used as decoration. Betty’s hummingbird and the Christmas snowman (both in FAOL archives) are great examples of what I was looking for. Still looking for a new xmas fly recipe. Thanks.
That’s why I didn’t post this over there in your thread. You got me thinking the Christmas direction, but I knew this wasn’t what you were looking for.
I have a couple of ideas, though. I will post those in your thread.
Free Style. I saw the thread on Christmas flies and was surfing for some patterns and saw a ton of Salmon Flies with Christmas themes none of which I had everything I needed for. So, I sat down and started tying with what I had. I have about 4 hours in this fly. It would have been a lot less time if I had found the Salmon Fly tutorials on FAOL sooner than 3 hours in.
The key to tying a great salmon fly that ends up being a work of art rather than for fishing is to TAKE, YOUR, TIME… The next thing is to PRACTICE and PRACTICE some more… Have fun and be creative… The more you tie, the better youll get… The time to buy salmon fly materials is now… Artistic hooks and salmon fly materials are getting scarce and harder to come by, whats left to be had… It also gets more expensive as time goes by so the sooner the cheaper… The last fly took me 5 hrs to tie… That wasnt counting prepairing the tying materials in advance or retying parts of the fly… Invest in a burnisher if you tie floss in the body so you can smoothe it out… I have spent as long as 3 days to tie just 1 salmon fly…
I am sure that some flies can take days to tie, but if you look at this fly, you will see it really is very simple as salmon flies go. The body is not segmented, the wing is a single pair of feathers, no veiling, no cheek other than the jungle cock and a very simple throat. It’s an overgrown wet with topping is all. No way it should have taken me as long as it did.
I had a very nice set of married wings made for it… Kinda Candy cane looking red and white, 7 segments. Darn things took me an hour to build. Each strip was exactly 7 barbs wide. They went on nice and I managed over the next 3 hours, to destroy them with the topping rolling on me. When I found the tutorial, and saw the trick of using a pair of smooth pliers to flatten the quill to keep it from rolling, I cussed a lot, flattened the quills and tied on the Lady Amherst wings, flattening the quills on them as well. I was in no mood to build another set of married wings right then. :lol:
The one thing I really had trouble with on the body was the oval tinsel tag. You can at the front how I was not able to tie it off without a bit of a lump or thickening of the body right there. I’m not quite sure how to avoid that. I’m open to suggestions. Maybe I can mash that with the pliers as well.
which brand of oval tencil do you use ? the better (5-8$ range) has a core in the center… before you tie the oval tencil in at the start in point, grasp the tencil about 1/8" from the end with your thumb nail and fore finger nail and pinch the tencil while pulling to reveile the core… tie this core in then procede to wrap your tencil… tying the core does away with a bulge at the starting point and also at the ending point…that core can be flattened to allmost nothing by just pulling at it with fingernails…
It’s Danville’s. I got a ton of threads and tinsel and floss from the Sportsman’s Warehouse by the house here when it closed at 90% off. I wish I had grabbed more now.
I tie lots of display flies and many full dress salmon flies as well and have for nearly 50 years… Your body floss looks quite good, aside from the early lump. I tie in all materials to the full length of the body. That will keep the body uniform.
Tie in floss at the front end, wrap back and then forward. Good floss is a huge help. WIth cheap floss you get exactly one chance to get it right…
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Thank you. Eric Austin has worked with me a lot on the finer points of floss bodies, tinsel tags and the like on traditional winged wets. I have not got to the point of counting thread wraps, yet, but find myself slipping that direction sometimes. I have found that the techniques Eric has been encouraging me to use carry over to lots of flies, dries, wets, nymphs, you name it. I was attempting to apply technique from the traditional wets to the salmon fly and it worked most places. I could not, however, keep that topping from rolling on me. Eric’s tutorials are quite good on these subjects as well.
I was trying to keep the bulk of the body down but would normally tie the materials the length of the body with a wet for the same reason you mentioned. Now that it has been mentioned, I seem to remember either reading or being told by Eric something about the core of the oval tinsel to avoid just this thing.
The floss is one strand of 4 strand Danville floss wrapped back and then forward. The thread I used for the bulk of the fly is white UTC Ultra 70. That stuff flattened out very nicely helping with the smooth body a lot.
I have another one in the vice that is much more involved. I have not settled on a wing as yet. I am leaning toward building another set of those married wings I destroyed on the first one. We’ll see.
