How to Tie a Dubbing Body to a Dry Fly: Basic Fly Tying Instructions

Video Transcript

" Hi, this is Robert Brown for Expert Village.com and in this clip I am going to be demonstrating how to apply a dubbing body to a dry fly. Dubbing as we discussed earlier is this fine little material and one of the things we can do to really improve the quality of dubbed bodies is go ahead and play with your dubbing. Play with your dubbing a lot. Don’t be afraid. Wash your hands so you don’t get it overly saturated with finger oils but play with it and pull the fibers free. The more you play with it the better the dubbing gets. One of the things that really separate novice flies from professional flies is how free they get the dubbing before they begin. Now this is a lot of dubbing. I am holding in my hands enough dubbing to dub probably 20, 30, 40 or maybe more. So the second novice mistake is getting too much dubbing on the fly. I am going to take those two strands of floss and I am going to apply a very small amount of dubbing wax. You can over do this. You can over do this so bad that your fly will just drive you nuts. What the dubbing wax is going to do is going to stick this dubbing fiber to that thread just beautifully. Again, novice mistakes common one made is to get too much dubbing fiber on the threads. Some times if you are having a little bit of trouble you can take individual fibers and kind of work them in by finger. Just kind of like that. You want just enough dubbing that you can see the color of the dubbing on the thread. It becomes a dominant color. You don’t want so much dubbing that it just over rules everything. There are two reasons you don’t want too much dubbing. One reason you don’t want too much dubbing is because dubbing is a material that will saturate with water very rapidly. I will begin wrapping the body of the fly with the dubbing and as I do that I am building up the body of the fly. Again, you don’t want the body of the fly to be so fluffy and so fiber filled that when it hits the water it saturates because if it does your dry flies won’t float that well. "