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Fly Tying Manuals

Learn » Learning Center Resources » Fly Tying » Additional Fly Tying Manuals

Additional Fly Tying Manuals

The Fly Tying Group continues to contribute excellent materials to the FFI Learning Center through the contributions of authors Eric Austin and Jerry Coviello.  You will find 3 manuals on this page, including Guide to Using Hackle, Managing Quill Wings, and a Guide to Online Fly Tying Presentations.  We hope you find these manuals helpful in the pursuit of enhancing your fly tying knowledge and skills. 

 

Guide to Using Hackle

When I began tying in the ‘60s the hackle available to us was limited. I remember there was a short period when grizzly hackle, or Plymouth Rock as it was called then, was completely unavailable. Even if you could find a decent neck it was exceedingly difficult to tie small flies, and you were down in the short pin feathers at the base of the neck to manage even a size 18 dry fly.

Today we have an embarrassment of riches where hackle is concerned. We have genetic dry fly necks, saddle hackle, Bugger Packs, various types of hen hackle, Schlappen, Deceiver Packs, Coq de Leon, Tailing Packs, the list goes on and on. But with all these options it can be daunting to figure out just which type of hackle is best for a given fly. I’ll try to clarify this and show some ways to best use hackle in each application.

Eric Austin, Author

Managing Quill Wings

Tying quill wings for dry flies and wet flies can sometimes be frustrating. This document will use three different flies to help you with learning how to secure quill wing sections to your dry fly and wet fly. Flies in the document are: Blue Dun Dry Fly; Leadwing Coachman Wet Fly; and Henryville Special Caddis Dry Fly. One day while browsing the fly racks in a fly shop I noticed there aren’t that many flies tied with quill.

Jerry Coviello, Author

Guide to Online Fly Tying Presentations

Online communication gave us a great way to social distance yet be linked together and able to interact
with each other.

With new tools and technology comes a big learning curve. We need to understand the technology and new terms. We need to break the mold of being in-person as a fly-tying demonstrator and learn new ways to present our “How To” to the audience. We also need to learn how to be entertainers. Yes, we are now in the entertainment business. We are used to having an in-person audience, now we are talking to a computer screen where our audience is on the screen miles away from us. 

Cameras are now the eyes of our audience, and we need to know how to use them as we try to teach and show our fly-tying techniques over the internet.

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