How to Make the Muddler Minnow Fishing Fly
In tying the Muddler Minnow, begin by starting the thread 3/16 of an inch behind the eye of the hook, provided you want to use two clamps of deer hair on the front of the fly. If you’re going to use one clamp and move the thread forward about a 16th of inch. Wrap the thread to the end of smooth wraps, to the end of the shank and tie on the tail. The tail should be about the width of the gap of the hook and should extend out a half an inch—beyond the tie end point. Use your pinch technique. Leave the excess material on the top of hook, wrap forward, bring the thread quickly to the rear of the hook and in this fly instead of using flat gold tensil, I'm going to use flat gold tensil braid. Lay the tensil over the thread, grab it underneath, slide it up at sic o’clock underneath the hook and wrap it forward. Trim off the excess material. Bring your thread up to the back section of the head and wrap the tensil forward. You can see how nice and smooth that lace down. There is around tensil braid and then the flat tensil braid and I’ve really find that this works much better for this particular fly. If you want a great deal of bulk, then the round would work extremely well.
Generally, these are fish on the bottom, so you may want to weight them depending on the depth to the stream it occur that you’re fishing. Now, bring the thread back onto the body and it will establish a small thread base on which to mount the wing—the thread in the middle of the thread base. I'm going to use Grey Squirrel tail for the underwing. Small quantity, also this should be head cemented just as we did with the bucktail because it’s a very slippery material and if you don’t it has a tendency to want to pull out. Let’s put a little head cement on the squirrel tail, extend that underwing about halfway back on the tail. Make a 360-degree loop again just as we did with bucktail. Bring it down on top of the hook. Establish a thread base again. Few hair is sticking out there, that’s all underwing. For the wing of the fly, we’re using a wild turkey. Turkey feather like this, a left and a right, taking the wing material off one side on the right and the left feather, put them together with the dull side facing each other and that over wing will come back as far as the underwing to the middle of the tail. Use the pinch technique. Make sure that centered on top of the fly, looks pretty good. Trim off the excess material. Make additional thread wraps and we’re finished.
Now, I am going to change from 6/0 thread, I was using 6/0 Beige or white thread is okay. I'm going to change over then Dynacord 3/0, which is as heavier a stronger thread, not necessarily much heavier but a much stronger thread to put on the deer hair because I don’t want to be able to apply reasonable amount of pressure to the hair when I tie it on. Now in this particular technique, I'm not going to use the traditional spin method which is customarily thought and written about in books and on some videos. The system I use is this. I take the clamp of hair about the size of a pencil, calm it out, get the under fur. Take your stacker and actually if the hair is fairly straight, you can get by without stacking here. Stack it, get the tips even, pull out any short hairs under fur that might be in there.
Now, the length of the colors up to the tire and generally I like to make the color come back to the point of the hook. This happens to be a Partridge—streamer hook and here you look at the point. I'm going to bring the hair back to that point. Slide the hair over the hook. Cut infront of the eye, make two thread wraps and pull and you’ve got the color. Pull the hair back at two thread wraps or two or three thread wraps. Now, if you were going to tie this with just a single clamp of hair, you’d merely move the body and wing forward another 16th of an inch and you just trim this and you’re done but I wanted to tie it in this fashion to show you how to put on that second clamp of hair which is what gives many tires a problem. Comb out the hair. Again, get all that under fur out. Trim off the tips and you have a piece about a half an inch long. Pull the hair back, lay it at a 45-degree angle. Bring the bottom up close to the hook and just barely catch the opposite side right behind the eye of the hook and just spin that hair around—make a couple of thread wraps, take a half inch tool, make three thread wraps. One, laying at the half inch tool on top of the thread, 1, 2, 3, put that over the eye of the hook and pull it off. You may do it the second time 1, 2, 3, slide it off, that’s a whip finish. You have done the whip finish, there’s no need to use regular whip finish tool. Now, you’re going to take a pair of scissors. You can use straight or curve if you have the curve that really helps. I’m going to trim that. And the reason I trim the—I trim the hair infront of the eye is so that the box do not stick back even with the color.
Okay. There is the completed fly. The technique of sticking the hair over the hook is one that will speed up your time. It’s much easier to do and you get an even distribution of the color all the way around the fly and you can trim the bottom off if you like. That’s up to the individual tier.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services