Turkey Flats

How are your tying skills coming along? Do you realize how far you’ve progressed since we started this series? Hopefully you’ve been practicing enough so that each new challenge is easier than you thought it would be. This session, we’ll start with something familiar and progress to a new challenge.

We’ve already tied a standard dry fly, split tails a couple of ways and tied a thorax fly. What if we tied a fly that has a split tail, hackle trimmed like a thorax fly and a thorax fly wing, but positioned the wing and hackle closer to the front of the hook like it is in a standard dry fly? Would that be considered unconventional? Of course it would, but then again, I’m a little unconventional anyway, so let's do it.

If you look at a real mayfly, you’ll notice that in some species of mayflies, the wings are attached forward of the regular attachment point for a conventional thorax pattern.

I guess I prefer to match the hatch more than I prefer to be conventional. Our first fly this week is an unconventional twist on the conventional thorax fly. It uses a conventional wing and tail, but the wing and hackle are moved forward slightly to match those mayflies with forward attached wings.

Conventional thorax flies use turkey flats for wings.




Notice that the top of the flat is flat? That’s how the feather gets its name. This type of feather forms a nice wing with the tips of the wing being flat, just like in the feather.

Thanks to Al Campbell!

Happy Fly Tying!
Ron