Don, Your comments got me to thinking about the early days of fly tying hackle. For the sake of discussion consider the Griffiths Gnat fly. The original was created back in the dark ages of hackle quality. If you tie it with today's hackle would the fly go from being an emerger to a dry fly? It may have been intended as a dry fly originally but could it have floated as well as one tied with a Whiting neck hackle available today. I'm just musing on the subject because I wasn't around to know what the original was like. Bill
Joyce is sooooooo right on. New tiers can't remember what it was like trying to get decent feathers to tie small dries 3 or 4 decades ago. A size range on a neck was pickled clean in no time, as many times it took two feathers to tie a decent dry. They were harder to tie with, had short sweet spots, and the finished product didn't look anywhere near what you see today. Tying was more of a challenge-turned-frustration than anything else when it came to small dry flies. If you had the money back then, you could wait your turn and maybe get a quality Metz, or at least what we though was quality, at the time. Most tiers had shoe-boxes full of necks with the middles striped out and the rest going to waste, unless they stooped to trimming hackles when all else failed. This trimming wasn't ever accepted commercially because of how webby the larger feathers were, and trimming put the webs at the tips- not good unless you wanted wet flies. This was the motivation for Henry Hoffman and others to start working on the saddles for dry fly use. When I got my first 'new generation' Whiting super saddles about 7 or 8 years ago, I was so engrossed in tying with them that I didn't stop tying dry flies until I had run out of hooks, about 6 or 700 flies later. I ignored everything else as I was having so much fun tying with the new stuff. Interestingly, I didn't even put a noticeable dent in the saddles I had after that many flies. Then I got my first cree. Wow! I tied more dry flies in 6 months (with pleasure) than I had in my entire life (40 years of tying). So I for one don't take these new feathers for granted, and Joyce and other long-time tiers will all agree. I can tie 8-10 flies with one hackle before I need the hackle-pliers to tie the tip portion. Even the old tying instructions for dry fly hackling needed to be revised. You're right Joyce. Counting flytying blessings. DonO --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.659 / Virus Database: 423 - Release Date: 4/15/2004
