Saturday, January 19, 2013

Soft Hackle Flies: A follow up by Paul DiNolo

My friend Paul has just prepared another article about soft hackles, which I published on the Web site earlier this evening.  I am writing about it here on the blog, but the full article and five photos of samples he tied and sent to me with the article are on fishingwithflies.com, here:

http://www.fishingwithflies.com/FliesWithaStory.html

It's at the top of the list, story #88.  Story #87 was also written by Paul and I published it two weeks ago, about his Soft Hackle Brassie and how to fish it.  The two articles are a good complement to each other.

1 comment:

trublubug said...

I totally agree with Paul's comments on the soft hackle flies. They are truly KISS flies (Keep It Simple Stupid), and although they may not be as popular as they once were with fisherman, the fish still love them. I found the comment about a size 10 for pan fish very apt as well. It has been my experience that in streams with populations of both trout and pan fish, it is almost a necessity to go small if you want to score consistently on the trout. Having said this, I can get to my real point here.

I've purchased any number of the commercially available hen skins and I find the numbers of usable feathers in the 18-20 hook size range almost negligible. I wish I could train the neighbors cat to bring the birds it catches to my place instead of dumping them on their porch....ha ha ha. Does anyone have some good experiences with soft hackle feathers for the really small sizes?