Wally Wing Parachute

Recipe

Hook: TMC 900BL or similar
Thread: Black or match body color
Parachute post: mallard flank feather - wally wing style
Tail: med. dun hackle barbs
Body and thorax: dubbing to suit your area - I use a callibaetis color from Spirit River for all my BWOs
Hackle: med. dun

I'm sure that all of you know from the tutorial that you must soak the flank feathers before hand. Strip off all the fluff, etc. and put them in a bowl of water. It's best to soak them for a minimum of ten minutes, and they can stay in the water indefinitely.

Not everyone ties parachutes the way I do. There are almost as many different ways to apply a parachute hackle as there are patterns that call for it. Do whatever is easiest for you and makes you happy. However, I do want to stress one thing. In the video I mention, sort of in passing, that you should always wrap your parachute hackle counter-clockwise. This is something that I feel very strongly about. There are a lot of folks (some of them well known "authorities" who've written many books) that say it doesn't matter which direction you wrap. I couldn't disagree more, and here's why: One of the common errors made tying parachutes is hackle that is too loose. If you wrap your hackle clockwise you're compounding this problem because when you tie off the hackle the thread is trying to loosen your wraps. This is compounded further by the fact that the barbs will be pointing toward you on clockwise wrapped hackle, causing the thread to grab onto those barbs and try even harder to loosen your hackle. If you always wrap counter-clockwise you eliminate one more stumbling block on the path to good parachutes, and of course it's also useful for other reasons as you see in the video.

In the next installment I promise to tie something that you haven’t seen before – at least from me.