Spinning Soft-Hackles
The popularity of soft-hackle flies is on the upswing, and with good reason. Few patterns are more versatile than soft-hackles. By varying a softhackle’s materials, size, and color, you can create patterns to imitate many aquatic organisms, including caddis pupae, emerging mayflies, assorted drowned insects, sow bugs, and snails.
Try swinging these patterns on a tight line in riffles, back eddies, and seam lines during a hatch, especially an evening caddis blizzard, and you’ll like the feeling of your arm being yanked by the strikes. But as simple as these bugs are, they can be frustrating to tie.
There are two problems with tying soft-hackles the traditional way It’s often difficult to keep the brittle stem from breaking, because the feather is wrapped by its delicate tip, and perhaps more frustrating, it is difficult to find the right size feathers to make consistently sized flies. Typically, tiers run out of feathers of the right size and then use whatever they have on hand. Usually these feathers are too big (the small ones can be impossible to work with), and the tier ends up tying a batch of bugs that look like something the cat hacked up.
About six years ago I was confronted with a tying order for 30 dozen soft-hackle flies of assorted sizes and styles. Knowing the potential headaches involved, I approached that order with a bit of dread. I pulled out about ten partridge skins, and realized that I didn’t have enough small feathers on all of them combined to complete the order.
“That’s it,” I thought. “There has got to be a better way to do this.” Amid piles of feathers, empty beer cans, and four-letter words, I fiddled around all night with everything I’d ever read on soft-hackles. Finally, after continual tinkering, I came up with a technique that works like a charm. I could tie the most perfect soft-hackles using any size feather for any size fly, and do it in seconds. I actually finished all of the flies without having to walk wheat fields shooting at fly-tying material.
You need nothing unusual to tie soft-hackles this way. Any upland gamebird feather will do. Partridge is probably the most common, but you can use grouse, pheasant, woodcock, or duck flank. The most important decisions to make are what color and how much mottling you want.
The Spinning Technique
Cut a V-shaped notch into the tip of the feather. For a standard soft-hackle, the length from the bottom of the vee to the tip should be just a little longer than the hook shank. Pull the rest of the fibers away from the bottom of the stem, leaving only as many fibers remaining as you want for the hackle on the finished fly—usually about 10 to 15 on either side of the vee.
After tying whatever tail and body you want on your fly, wrap a ball of dubbing directly behind where the hackle will be placed. A bigger ball of dubbing will make the hackle stick out more; a smaller dubbing ball (or none at all) will allow the hackle to lie flatter over the hook shank.
Hold the feather by the stem in your scissors hand. Place it flat over the top of the hook shank, concave side down, with the bottom of the vee directly on top of the dubbing ball. With your thumb on one side of the hook and forefinger on the other, gently stroke the hackle fibers down around both sides of the hook and lightly pinch the fibers. Pull the bottom of the vee forward along the hook shank to just beyond the eye; then make a loose wrap of thread around the hook and fibers, gradually tightening the thread with successive turns. You want to spin the individual barbs into place, as you might with deer hair.
Before clipping the excess material, you can manipulate the hackle fibers into their proper place if they are not where you want them. Lift the hackle stem, clip the excess, and whip-finish. With a little practice, you can create perfect hackle collars.
Over the past few years, I have shared this technique with guides, friends, and fly-tying students. They quickly realize that with this method they can use a wide range of materials for soft-hackles, and concerns about the size of the feather and fly are soon forgotten. Friends in Wyoming now tie #18 Baetis emergers with blue grouse saddle, and in western Montana, a #16 Carey Special variation tied with pheasant rump has become the ticket on tough, sunny summer days.
You can also use this technique with a bead behind the soft hackle or other soft-hackle variations. Use it to be inventive, and soon you’ll be using feathers that suffer a lonely existence as fly-tying scrap.
Pat Berry is a commercial fly tier who was featured in the video Tying Flies with Jack Dennis. He lives in Waterbury, Vermont.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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