Picture-Perfect Parachutes
[This article is an excerpt from Charlie Craven’s Basic Fly Tying (Headwater Books, Sept. 2008). The Editor.]
A parachute-style fly is characterized by the way the hackle is wrapped horizontally around the wing post rather than vertically around the hook shank. This method of wrapping the hackle lets the body of the fly sit lower in and on the surface film of the water and gives a more realistic impression to the fish.
Not only does the upright wing post give the fish the wing silhouette they are hoping for, it also makes the fly much easier for you to find and follow on the water. Most of the mayfly patterns I fish these days are tied with parachute hackles.
A Right and a Wrong Way
There are several schools of thought about how to properly wrap a parachute hackle. One school suggests wrapping the feather so the concave side of the feather faces down as you wrap it down the parachute post. This results in the hackle fibers tilting down, raising the body of the fly slightly off the water’s surface. This also creates problems when wrapping the hackle, as the first wrap of hackle tends to get in the way of the second and so on and so forth.
The other, correct, school of thought advocates wrapping the hackle feather so the concave side of the feather faces up, allowing the body of the fly to sit lower in the surface film while at the same time permitting the hackle to be wrapped in clean concentric wraps down the post. Wrapping the feather with the concave side up results in the first turn of hackle being slightly cupped up toward the top of the wing, clearing the path for the next turn of hackle, and this continues as you wrap down the post. Think of the hackle in this instance as the top of an upside-down umbrella versus the right-side-up umbrella of the previous example.
There is the added choice of how to actually tie the feather in. Some poor, misdirected tiers attach the feather to the hook shank in front of the wing at the bottom of the post and wrap it from the base of the post to the top and back down again, which would be the equivalent of tying your hackles in at the hook eye on an Adams, wrapping them back to the front of the body, and then forward again through the hackle you just wrapped up to the hook eye. As you can imagine, this produces a fly that looks like something you scraped off the bottom of your shoe.
I know there are several other misdirected tiers who advocate stripping the fibers from the base of the stem, wrapping bare quill to the top of the post, and then turning the actual hackle fibers from the top down; a whole lot of work for a still-not-as-good result. It’s awfully hard to wrap a clean hackle collar
over a lumpy, bumpy base of exposed stripped quill.
So, what are we going to do about all this, you ask? We are going to tie the feather to the hook shank in front of the wing and wrap the thread around the wing base and bare feather stem together to the top of the post. This leaves the base of the feather at the top of the post, with the requisite half turn or so of bare stem to prevent splaying the hackle fibers, and the thread will be left hanging at the base of the wing, awaiting the hackle tie-off. This permits us to wrap the hackle cleanly down the post to the base, creating a beautiful horizontal hackle collar.
Several methods are viable for tying off the hackle feather once it is wrapped, but most of them are relatively complicated. For far too long I was a staunch advocate of trapping the tip of the feather against the hook shank behind the eye with the thread, until I gave in and tried tying off the hackle feather on the post. Tying off on the post with an unobtrusive thread such as Gudebrod 10/0, Gordon Griffiths 14/0, or Giorgio Bennechi 12/0 eliminates any difficulties catching the feather, any chance of trapping fibers so they splay out and become disarrayed, and is easily mastered in far less time than other methods.
Using a synthetic wing material like McFlylon allows us to mount the wings on the hook using the spinner wing to upright method (yes, I just named the technique), which creates almost no bulk on the hook shank. Contrast this with bulky wing materials like calf body hair or turkey T-base feathers, and you’ll quickly see why McFlylon has an edge. While calf-body hair and turkey are super visible, tying them down creates a lump on the hook shank that is completely out of place on a slender little pattern like a Parachute Adams or Blue-winged Olive.This lump also makes it hard to form a smooth lifelike taper under the body.
McFlylon comes in a variety of visible colors—gray, white, and hot pink are standards in my fly box. I use gray wings when I want the most accurate match to the naturals, white when I want visibility under most conditions, and hot pink for weird light or along foam lines where the white winged flies just blend in.
The only other wing color I carry in my box is black, which is perfect for fishing in the evening when the sun is at a flat angle across the water and turns the surface to a sheet of silver. This afternoon glare can negate the visibility of nearly any wing color. Under these conditions, everything that was dark under the high sun is glaring white, and your previously visible fly disappears when it touches down. A black wing shows up like no tomorrow in this flat light.
I use a biot abdomen on my parachutes, though you can also use a completely dubbed body. I like the natural taper and color variation of smooth biot bodies, and find that they float longer than conventional dubbed-body flies. The solid biot body doesn’t soak up enough water to affect the floatation of the fly, while dubbing gets slimed when a fish eats the bug and is much harder to dry out and bring back to life. I even tie my Parachute Adams with a natural gray Canada goose biot body, and use dyed goose biots for every other parachute pattern I tie.
On a final note, I always dub the thorax of the fly to match either the abdomen color or the thorax color of the real insect. Some folks get all excited about matching the natural’s exact abdomen color, then go and leave bare thread for the thorax. If you are going to go to all the trouble to tie this fly, spend the extra five seconds to dub the thorax so the fly looks like it’s finished.
Charlie Craven owns Charlie’s Fly Box in Arvada, Colorado. His website is charliesflyboxinc.com.
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