How to Tie a Tail for a Dry Fly: Basic Fly Tying Instructions

Video Transcript

"In this clip I am going to be showing you how to tie in a tail for a dry fly. It is similar to a technique for wet fly except that I am going to go ahead and use golden pheasant neck fibers. You want to grab just enough of them. You get this nice color and you want all that color banding to be wind up and even. Proportions again are important so you want to pay a little bit of attention to that. You are going to put it just like tying a wing for a dry fly and put the fibers on top of the hook. You don’t want them to roll down and around and under the hook. We are going to tie that in real nice and work our way back just a bit until we get it the way we want it. Now as we work forward we are going to keep the fibers up on the top and when we did the wing, we created a little ramp if you will. What you want to do now is take these tail fibers that are pointing forward and you want to work your way all the way up toward that ramp begins. When you get to where that ramp begins, you want to create an opposite direction ramp and you are going to do that by pulling the fibers up and cutting them just like you did in the beginning for the wing so that you will end up with a nice even. The tail fibers will be overlapping the wing fibers and since they were sloped opposite each other, they will end up just completely flushed. That is what you want to do with your tails on you dry flies as much as you can. There are a couple of fly patterns that don’t blend themselves well to that and then you have to find alternate methods."