How to Tie in the Hackle: Fly Tying Pattern for a Parachute Adams

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jeff Wilkins on behalf of Expert Village. Now, we're ready to tie the hackle. Now, tying the hackle is two steps really. It's preparing the feathers first, and then holding them the right way to tie them in. All I'm going to do here is simply strip some of the fibers off these two hackles I have here. This fly calls for a grizzly and a brown. I'm going to strip the base of it, this grizzly hackle, so that we have a bare stem and we'll take the brown one and we'll do the same thing with that one as well. You can tie these hackles, or feathers, in together or separately, whichever you prefer. I'm going to lay them on top of one another. I'm going to put the brown on top. The hackle's going to have a little curvature to it. I'm going to curve, lay the feathers on top of one another, so the curves in the hackles match each other. The top brown feather kind of cups the grizzly hackle, makes it a little easier to manage when it's like that. Now, I'm going to tie these in with the stems actually facing to the rear. They are going to point towards the tail. I'm going to tie them in right at the back edge of the wing, and come across them with about three tight turns, make sure they are positioned correctly, then make a couple of more turns. Then I'm going to go ahead and trim the stems off, put a little drop of cement there, as well, since that is a critical point. That's where we don't want the hackle to come loose. Just dab a little cement on that. Now, we've tied in the hackles. The points of the hackles or the tips are facing out toward the hook eye, or over the hook eye. Now, the final step in this fly is to finish the front of the fly, which is called the thorax. We're going to go back to the dubbing we were using before. Again, I'll do it sparingly. We want to use as little as possible. The fly, believe it or not, actually floats a little better with less material. So, we're going to do about an inch to start. Make sure it's there tightly, and in one direction only. I'll start behind the wing first, going over that area we just tied the hackle in. I'm going to lift the feathers upright, or the hackles upright, go in front of them and we're going to wrap around in front of the hackles, right up against the front edge of the wing base. That looks pretty good. Now, before I start wrapping this, I've got a few renegade fibers here at the front that is sticking out. I want to get rid of those. I'm just going to try to trim a few of those out of the way, so they don't get in the way when we're wrapping."