Tying the Tail: Woolly Bugger Fly

Video Transcript

"This is Jeff Wilkins for Expert Village. The tail is tied with turkey marabou; this is a really soft fluffy feather that has a lot of action and I'm going to measure; we want the finished tail to be from the hook eye, the front edge of the hook eye to the back of the bend; again it doesn't have to be perfect just close. Measure it with my right hand; my right hand a tyer, so that works pretty well. Measure it with the right, I'll transfer it to the left, and we're going to do a basic technique in fly tying called the "pinch". I let my fingers open up at the bottom here, so that I can pinch the hook, while I'm pinching the material and also we'll let the top of my fingers; I'll come up with the thread, let the top of my fingers come apart so I can also pinch the thread. So I have the hook shank, the material, and the thread pinched all at the same time. I go across the material; pull down and push down with your fingers; come up again and I'll repeat that step twice; three times; four times. All I'm concerned with at this point is to get the material on the hook shank and now we're going to make sure it's in position. It looks pretty good, it ended up on top, which is exactly what we want. Next I'm going to hold this tail, the part that'll stay; I'm going to hold it into position, and just while it's there give it a couple, maybe three or four more tight turns. That's fixed in position, it's the length that we measured to begin with, and now I'm going to trim off this excess; and if your particularly careful that will close in the gap at the tail and the body is even from where the tail was tied into the front of the head, which is going to make a real nice looking body and it's going to be a much neater fly."