How to Tie a Dry Fly-Adams Fly

Now, I'm going to tie an Adams dry fly. This is an American tradition because of the fact that something that everybody pretty much knows about throughout the United States. One of those flies that's an all around kind of match any kind of situation can also be thought as being an attractor. I tend to use it as an invitation of smaller flies like midges and even sometimes small mayflies. It's one of those flies that people would say if they had to have just one fly they would take the Adams with them and you'll see why if we give this a try because of the fact that it's so versatile.

I'm going to tie a size 14 today just to make it so it's easier for you to see what I'm doing. For me it's little larger because I'm used to using smaller sizes but it's certainly can be used in variety of sizes, large or small.

I am using a black thread and I'll start off right while we are doing that, fixing up the thread. And again just to show you once you get that figured out every time I take it. I begin with the beginning of the hook. I wrap a couple of times around, Let me get started, let me do it one more time. Then I'm going to slowly take that thread and lay it back against the hook and wrap back over itself.

I'm going to stop at this point, just about at the bend of the hook. For this fly I'm going to use actually three materials, and that's going to be a Grizzly hackle, which is like this one here, this is the Bar Grizzly which comes Plymouth Rock Chicken gives you a good sense of modeling in the wing section, and also a dark ginger or you can also use a brown hackle for this. They are mixed together within the fly.

For the body I'm going to use muskrat, you've got under body of the muskrat. I'm not going to have the guard here as in this one, I want to actually have just a nice sense of gray for the body. You can supplement that for a synthetic gray if you'd like to. It's not the end of the world you could do that. But I tend like to use the traditional materials how it was first developed because it seems to perform the best that way.

Okay, so I am going to start with the tail first then I'll apply the wings. First thing I'm going to put in a small brown tail, and I'm going to actually lay another tail on top of that, so it will be a mixture, obviously end brown within the same tail. I'm looking at this for a spade hackle, look in the side for that again, I am going to find a nice stiff, different kind of a look to the hackle, when we look over you can see why those are the ones that are the best for tailing. Look at how long these fibers are. They're long and they glisten because they're so stiff and they're very, very buoyant in the water.

You can cut these off if you'd like to, I tend to like to kind of flair them all like this away from the stem. Make sure my fingers aren't wet. Sweat, dry them a little bit, and then I take my index and my thumb and I pinch down across the tips, the amount that I think I am going to use and I pull it and I pluck it off.

By doing that I've got the whole flea now, I've got them all even from the very beginning. We did a pretty nice job with that this time. They don't always work out but that one worked out pretty well. I'll pull a few of those away because I want to make sure I have not a huge bushy tail since I'm putting in two tails in one.

To figure out the length on this I'm going to say, I want to go about -- may be just little bit in this situation maybe about a 16th of an inch past the bed of the hook. So the length of the hook and its entirety, plus a little bit more. Adams should have a relatively long tail. It's tied in a pretty traditional manner in the sense of there is almost like a paintbrush application of the fibers. But I tend to flair them a little bit, and I'll show you how I do that.

So again I'm going to come down with a soft loop first and then cinch it up. I'm going to kind of wiggle probably back and forth to get that tail looking flair for me. I want it to be a little bit longer so I'm going to pull them back a little bit, just kind of squeeze them back. Not happy with that turned out; I'm going to put it out again. There we go.

Okay, pull them back, cinch them up nice and tight and let them stay. Okay, that worked out just fine. Then I cut off this excess right here. Couple of more wraps, not many because I don't want to get too much of bulk back there. I want to tie in my Grizzly a little bit longer so the brown will set underneath there. It really is not super-crucial that you have this nice mixture of feathers, but it does give you more of a sense of kind of a multi-colored fly. I've got a half neck right here, I'm going to pull this off of this spade hackle.

I've got a variety of them as soon as I'll jump back and forth to find certain things between my necks. This one seems to have nice long fibers like I am looking for. So I pull that down so I can take a look at them, same method again. I'm going to grab a bunch; I'll pull them down, pull them out. Make me fierce off, nice and dry, and I've got a pretty good bunch of hackle fibers there.

Sometimes feathers tend to curve a little bit, this one seems to be curving a little bit. Slow curve, almost like a very shallow, shallow convex kind of a curve. I am going to let those curves go up away from body.

So I'm going to lay it in a little bit longer this time, just a little past that brown. Now it's also slightly okay if you want to just mix those fibers together in your hand. That's something that I have also done before in the past and seen quite a bit.

Now my tail is just pretty much complete for now. If you want to flair that tail a little bit, I can take my thumbnail and push up underneath here, and then I want it to be like a big giant grizzly thing, but I want to make sure they flair a little bit to help to sit on the surface.

You can also work your thumbnail down on top, because I'm going to let that sit for a while just to make sure it's safe, doesn't get bumped out of place. I'm going to actually put a little bit of head cement on that back wrap where the tail is tied in, just a little bit, not too much. I'll make sure it stays nice and secure when I am doing the rest of tying. Some people insist, but that's what they should do every time, anyway, just to make sure those fibers won't pull out during the fishing.

So, I'm going to put the wing and I'm going to get up to right about I guess three quarters away, or three quarters of the length up. So I am not going to go up to the hook eye, not right in the middle, it's little past the center. For this I've pre-selected a couple a hen hackles. These are also grizzly. You can use feathers from the regular rooster neck if you wanted to, it's okay to use this here. If you flip them over you can find that there actually are these very wavy hackles that work very well. But they usually aren't quite as many of them, you have to kind of be careful with them, if you kind of try a lot of Adams, you run out fast. You could also tie in with just a general sense, just a wider, broad, wavier section from the main body of the neck, but the hen hackles really give you a nice sense of opacity which means that they are pretty much solid. You don't see a bunch of fibers splaying out that allow light to pass through. So it look like a nice clean silhouette.

I am going to clean them up by pulling away all the extra material till I get the wing size that I want. Size 14 and the wing should be about a length of the shank or a little bit more, string at the hook eye, that might be a little long but I'm gong to leave it long for the beginning. So I have something to play with if I need straight them out. So I'm going to get that one cleaned up. And then get the other one cleaned up as well.

I move this material, it's not a bad idea to leave it a little bit longer every time because you'll see it's little easier to lash it down if you've got some fibers underneath there. So it's just a straight clean stem. Let me cut that away now, cut this away.

Now, I want to take these feathers and I want to have them so the concave sides are out. So I'm taking these two round in size I'm placing them together. I want to match up my tips so they are nice and straight on the top, even, check them. I'd like to often check them against some kind of a light or neutral background if I have any kind of complicated things in front of me like I have a bunch of materials it's hard to see, so if I have light spot on the wall or something it's easiest to do, it's like putting in some light background like you see what I'm doing.

Now, I'm going to take these and I'm going to lay them in. Started out the wrong way again here, tend to do that because I'm used to tying things in facing backwards. I'm going to lay them in and over hook, this direction, so I'm going to make sure I've got the length figured out where I want to start, pull back, and I'm going to let those stems kind of straddle, hook a loose turn first. Make sure I am wrapping somewhat on that material, not just on the stem, hold them tight. Now I can pull a little tighter.

This spun a little bit but I think for the most part that should be okay. I'm going to lift them up and wrap it in front of them now. I might just overboil a little bit in terms of how far back they are going to go. My fingers are sweating a bit, so I'm getting some moisture on them but okay, they'll dry out, they'll be just fine and little bit of that moisture will actually keep them where I want them, easier than if I have them just all dry.

I'm clipping out the extra material between, 100% necessary, but it's just nicer silhouette if I do that. Now I do next pattern in between them. Lash that down. Again I don't like all these little extra pieces so I'm going to get rid of them. Do it now set it later, it's easier to get in there when you don't have any hackle fibers that are going to be in the way. Get all that junk out, there we go, now it's nice and clean.

When I turn that I can see there is some nice display between them, they are well-positioned, they are clear and clean. Now the easier part, which is going to be the dubbing, so I'm going to build up a little bit of a base right behind the wing, so I can taper this body up the way I want to look, it's quite a bit of it in there just kind of built that up. I've got a low spot, I don't want that there, I want to taper so it starts out thin and gets thicker towards the main part of the body up into the thorax.

Starting at the back let that hang. I'm using a little bit of a thinner thread on this one because I want to make sure that I get in tight without forming unsightly bumps because it can make it hard to taper body, so be careful again, let that sit back here, let it just rest on the tip of that hook or be away from the hook because if it's right on that tip you should cut that off.

Now I'm going to take my muskrat, and I'm going to cut a small portion of that muskrat away here, I'm going to put it up here in the light so I can see what I'm doing. I want to make sure I'm just going to cut it close to the skin, right down close to the skin, and now I've got a pinch between the thorax - I mean my index finger and my thumb and I want to switch to the other index finger and thumb. You can se all these shinny stiff color guard hairs. I don't want them in here on the Adams. It's okay if I had them in there for nymphs and flies they are supposed to have a lot of buggy, messy quality, but I'm going to take them out for this.

That wouldn't hurt things if you had them in there, but flies meant to be tied with more of a smooth, clean kind of an appearance in the body. Now I have them cleaned up. I want them all lay straight so I got kind of bunch them up like this, make it more or less a ball of dubbing. Again these sweaty fingers aren't helping much, but under these studio lights it's hard to keep them dry.

Okay, get my wax out, I'll tie with fly tying wax, applying with this applicator makes it very easy, of course there are other brands that just go on with bodkin which is fine. Pull the thread towards me and I want to be able to see some of that on there, so it's little bit of wax.

Now, I take my muskrat dubbing with dry fingers, I've got them, I'm going to lay them on here. I can actually do this, I can spread it out and in terms of a swatch as long skinny, I can just lay it on loosely and then start spinning it on.

Again the dubbing is more or less like a homemade sense of yarn, it's just spun piece of yarn. I'm going to keep it pretty thin, little thicker towards the front of this, in other words the end is going to go towards the thorax, but I don't want to get it too thick because I want to kind of work pieces in. This is very important that I have a nice clean relatively sparse-looking body on this, so not a big thick bulky body.

Here's a little trick that I found really effective. I start this out and I don't like that large bump that I've got right there. I can actually go back a little bit and I can -- once I've got some of it attached I can pull it down a little bit which will spread out that dubbing down away from the hook. So I can actually say, once again I am going to do that. I pull and I do some twisting.

Just like I start out very nice and thin, and I can start to move in, now I've got a low spot so I'm going to make sure I go a little bit heavier in there, I'm getting some bulkiness, I want to keep a nice tight body on the Adams, and I want to stop before I get to the wings. So I'm going to get little thicker right there and leave a little space. I want to point out what I'm talking about with that. My bodkin here, little space so we can see it right in behind here little ill area that I don't want to get clogged up. Because my hackle is going to sit in that space, so I have to be careful with that.

Now I got to select two hackles again, I am going to be using one grizzly and one brown. So, I'm going out this time with a different neck that I've got for my grizzly hackle, and I'm going to check and see if I've got the right one, I'm going to first of all let's take a guess and see how I got it right by holding in the air but I can actually go as far as taking this right up to the fly itself and draping it over, this is perfectly acceptable to do this. It should come up so it gets to be just about even with the top of the wings. I want just too short.

I've gotten pretty good at this over the years. I can just eye ball them but just to show you how I can actually achieve this, I'll check them for you by doing this. I can't see what's going on with the camera. That's close not quite there yet. Go for that right there, let's see what happens, so I'll take it, wrap it around, it should be just right.

You see what happens when I pushed that around it comes up and just about meets the tip of those wings. Here's waving on these hackles, and then there is the section down below if you take a look you can see that there is a thicker area in between, and I want to be able to see it so that I don't have I'll just bend it like this so we can see what happens.

I don't want to have to be able to see all kinds of thick wavy material up into the fibers that will actually wrap around, so I'm going to pull this off. I can leave a little of bit waving in there because it'll fill in some of the gap that I've left there, but I don't want it to be the point where I'm just wrapping a lot of waving around the hook because then I get soft points, and hackles won't have that nice stiff air-trapping quality that we're looking for. So I'm going to try this one in.

Now some put the stem in between the wings, it's okay to do that, but I'd like to tie them on the side. I've already pulled out a brown, of the same length, I am trying to make sure I match them pretty close to this. You can notice on this one I've got pretty dark sense of waving up the center then it's not going to be a problem though, don't worry about that if you have a cape that has a lot more of a dark base to it, specially with the Adams because you've already got dark fibers coming in from the grizzly, it's not a problem. So pull those away, cut that off and pull a few, little bit more of that waving away before I begin this.

Again I'll wrap that one in here -- I'll tie that one, excuse me. Same way I'm going to tie it in between the wings, leave some space onto the front of it, hold my wings so I don't have those getting all crazy when I tie that down, bring it back in there again, I want to make sure these both going to wrap now on edge as opposed to flat, so it's very important. So right now I am just kind of push them over so they are not going to get a chance to start off wrong. I am also wrapping so I have my concave side going forward. There are those that will actually mix them so you have one going one way or the other but I'd like to actually start out with having both the same for a static reason so again it makes it look nice clean, collar.

I'm going to start wrapping now by pulling it around, starts to wrap a little bit flat that's not the end of the world. I can get my thread up in front, then do that again. Okay, here I go, filling in that gap between the wings and the body. I'm watching to be sure that as I wrap this I'm going to put about may be three or four turns behind.

I'm going to take those wings and pull them back out of the way, and I start weaving in close to those wings, the wing and those pieces of stem that are holding the wings out. I'm just about to do it. Weave about three or four turns in front, come around a couple of times around that hackle stem, leave that thread up in there and tie it off.

And in there I sit close and clip that out, careful not to cut off all the stuff. Now, I'll often save these ends like this because of the fact there still a lot usable hackle on there. So I just keep the container next to my vise and I put them in there, so when I need, quick last-minute piece of hackle or something if I need to hackle in this spot that seems thin I'll just look in that little container, and I can find them there.

I've got an awful lot of extra material that I have in those little containers. I'm going to buy and they are very helpful. Now, I'm going to wrap in the grizzly. So again I'm going to hook this on hackle pliers at the tip. Before I get too crazy with this, I'm going to make sure that it's going to wrap in edges, seem like it's doing that, I give a little twist, take a look I can see what I've got here is that it's laying flat towards in front of the fly not laying flat on top of the fly but it's on edge.

Carefully, now I have to start for sure doing some weaving back and forth, just kind of a wiggling motion back and forth. I do not want to wrap in between the wings. So I'm not doing that, when I get to the base of the wing, I'm not going to go in between them, I'm going to now push them back and wrap in front of them.

Now, you have to be really careful with this weaving back and forth. So I push those fibers down in between, I can see the brown is starting to force itself up, whoop! There we go. If I was all by myself there might have been some words that wouldn't have been so pleasant, happens quite a bit and it's something that you've got to be very careful with.

This is typical of these long feathers because they are nice and supple in the stem. It's nice for wrapping but tend to be little weak and you put on a nice tight hackle pliers they'll often snap off, just that the wrong and you saw -- hey wait, I'll wait until I was in that position where I had no choice but start over again. Hackles have a mind of their own sometimes. Weave back through here, I am not satisfied now with this, I want to go back again because now after I took my time coming through there, I'm going to snap, I lost the proper weaving. I'll do it again. Nice and slowly. Bring it through up to that base, I'm weaving, okay make sure I'm not pushing them too bad. Now I grab those wings and weave them in there again very carefully. Careful not to push them down, not to get the brown ones pushed down too much.

It's a pretty heavy hackle fly, so I'm going to say two should be sufficient on this one, two wraps in front. Now, I often time my Adams pretty bushy, the reason being because of the fact that is invisibility for one thing, I can see them easier if I have more hackle, but also because I do fish these in a lot of different types of water and you may need to actually have a little more buoyancy to something about having a little thicker collar of hackle on the Adams tends to make it work at least for me. Now I want to be check to be sure, I want to flip this on the side, I'm going to make sure everything is okay.

Lot of times the hackles also want to get kind of caught so I'm going to make sure to reach underneath here and pull them and kind of spread them around, it's all okay to do this if you don't get them perfect first time, no big deal. If I have one that's bothering me, I'm looking right now for my tweezers, okay here they are. I can also go along with these tweezers and I can remove some of these fibers that kind of got away that might got pushed out, let's pull in there.

I'm bit of a perfectionist sometimes because of the fact that I am making my own flies, if I have to buy these and I found that there were fibers that were driving me crazy I would not be happy with that. But I can stop it now before I get too far. So it's up to you how much you want to tweak them, I'd like to tweak them more out a little bit. It's part of the fun for me.

Now, I'm at the point where I can tie this off. I'm going to hold these hackle fibers back. I'm not going to tie them back, but to get some out of the way and I can form a nice neat little head and I said little because I don't want to make a big head on this. A small head on a nymph or stream, well that's okay, relatively good size to have it on dry fly you don't want do that.

I've got a small head because there isn't much of a bulk in the front of that, and also even though not too much, I am going to add some weight to the fly that you don't want. I'm going to whip finish this. At this point you've got to be careful when you're tying a little bit smaller fly not to get those fibers underneath that thread when whip finishing.

I'll work that in there, put down, careful not to break my thread which is very common right now, it can happen. Here we go. Always breaks as I said before when you are not expecting it. I'll leave that thread hanging, I can't play around with that at all.

If you notice that my idea of hackle fibers that are kind of going forward and backward, it may not make for the most attractive fly but it is going to be better to suspend itself in the surface if you've got those fibers that go different directions.

Little head cement on the top and I also whisk it underneath right at the junction of the thread with the fly head. So with my little trick I flip my bodkin right in the eye of the hook when I am putting my cement away, so I can be sure that it is drying with something blocking that hole, so it can actually fill in with cement. I pull this at pretty good tension down, slide it up right and what I'm doing, I am going to show you one more time with this I slide it without any kind of a real strong tension, up the thread in there, and I can always just kind of nick it off and get it without even doing much of a cut, I can pull and slowly close those jaws in scissors.

So you don't need to go in there and be chopping at it to get that to work. I often do with the dry fly. I can turn this so you can kind of see what we've got here. Nice little splay I can turn it this direction and check underneath to be sure that my hackle fibers are okay. I often drop this into my hand, at the end. And I can actually take a look at it now from different angles and I can check it out, here's where I'd like to say if I look at my tail and I can see that my tail actually is not very well flair, I can do this, little bit of a playing with the flair, just push my thumbnail up underneath them.

I don't want to get a huge flair on this one because the fact that it's kind of a nice tail, but you can see what I've done now, it's a flair, little bit, just a bit. By doing that now I've got a better junction between the water and the fly. Bring that down you can see what I've got there. Put that back in the vise.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services