Fire Fly step-by-step

All about flies Fly Tying
1

[SIZE=3]Originally designed by Aaron Jasper

Fire Fly tied (my version) and photographed by Doug Korn

materials list:
Hook: scud heavy wire, #12-14
Bead: 6/0 Toho flo. orange glass bead
Thread: Serafil 120
Tail and Body: pheasant tail
Rib: 28 ga. copper wire
Thorax: peacock bronze dubbing of choice
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Tie in pheasant tail at bend.
Attach copper wire at bend with wire extending under bead. Wrap thread forward.
Wrap PT forward counter-clockwise, then bring wire forward with clockwise turns.
At the thorax wrap wire in close turns (5 or 6) to the bead. This adds weight and avoids using lead. Tie off and break wire.
Dub thread using the split thread technique or direct dubbing method.
Wrap thorax with dubbing noddle and whip finish behind the bead.
2

Always something you haven’t seen before - for all the fly tying demos I’ve seen, I don’t recall anyone tying in the wire ribbing the way you do it on this fly, Doug.

This is another good candidate for the bi-weekly edition FOTW. Neil might even use it twice !!

John

3

Yeah John, LOL, a few people wanted to see it and I was afraid to submit another FOTW now… I figured it might sit on the shelf for a while… Anyway, here it is…

4

Maybe this should go elsewhere, rather than sidetracking your fly pattern… but I was always bad about interrupting… :wink:

I use silver or gold beads usually and then coat them with Loon Hard Head, often in Flo Orange… They develop tremendous depth and the bead really shines…

5

Oh, forgot to mention this comes in part from a tip from Norm Norlander at his demos here in AK. We use tons of egg substitutes… He starts with a metal bead and coats it with hot melt glue while he spins it to keep it round… he gets that great depth with the translucent glue also.

6

hap, thanks for the tip…

But - I like the glass. I think it shines brightly and has some translucent qualities that metal just can’t have… Maybe it’s because I fish this fly as a trailer, only, behind a heavy nymph or other beaded fly to get it down to where it needs to be… I don’t like fishing two flies of the same pattern… I like the trailing fly to be lighter than the front or point fly so it bounces around back there in the current and such… Fished this way it out fishes the metal orange beads 4 to 1… IMHO…

  • hint, hint… I even fish the Fire Fly in the summer behind a hopper, it won’t sink your fly and it is deadly on rainbows anytime of the year… The only negative I’ve found is folks busting the beads on rocks… otherwise I’ll take glass everytime and I tie several other patterns with glass beads as well.

++ I spend way too much time tying flies now let alone painting beads… when would I fish?

7

Excellent points all… We tie quite a bit with glass beads and frankly missed the point that it is a glass bead.

I thought coating a glass beads body on a salmon fly we tie a lot of would fix the rock whackers. I was wrong. Rock whackers can break epoxy coatings right off the beads and shatter the beads!

The only thing worth pointing out again is the fact the Loon Hardhead creates quite a bit of translucence.
art

8

Saw someone do a band of thread and coat it with a thick “bubble” of epoxy, and it looked just like a bead. Just another option, but would probably get knocked off on the rocks too.