Nick Thomas has done it yet again and come up with a different pattern that is designed not for the eye but the fish. It is well thought out and different. We like that approach.
Don’t you just hate it when supermarkets and other stores shift all their stock around on the shelves? Just when you know where everything is and you can nip in, grab what you want and get out, you spend ages wandering around trying to find where the hell they’ve put everything. Of course they do it so you see stuff you haven’t noticed before and buy it. So it was that I was wondering around Hobbycraft trying to find where they had hidden the organza ribbon I’d come in to buy and passed a display of different types of scissors.My eye was caught by a pair of pinking shears. These are used by dressmakers to create a serrated edge on fabrics to prevent fraying, but it occurred to me that they might have a use for fly tying and Hobbycraft were better off by £5.
I’d been experimenting with wrapping different materials in tandem to create new textures for nymph bodies (more of that in future articles) and looking at the serrated blades of the pinking shears sparked a vision of overlapping scales. After fiddling around with some different materials I found that cutting Wapsi Thin Skin, which has a stiff card backing, gave the best results.
The trick is to make a cut the length of the serrated blades and then relocate the sheet back in the jaws matching up the teeth with the cut edges and make repeat cuts until you reach the end of the sheet. This produces a narrow strip of body material with one straight edge and one serrated edge. To make a second strip simply cut the pinked edge off the sheet using straight scissors and you’re ready to start again. That’s the only slightly complicated bit done. The rest is simply wrapping two materials, a haircut and a few quick swipes with a marker pen to produce a nymph with a fantastic texture and profile that looks like it needed a complex weaving technique to make. Just the way I like it in fact; it has all the essential elements to create an illusion of life made by a quick simple process which won’t make me curse when it doesn’t come back from a tree or a snag.
Hook Partridge CZ Authentic Czech Nymph 10-12
Thread Veevus 10/0 white
Underbody Green Floss
Abdomen Wapsi Thin Skin olive
Thorax/Legs Black organza ribbon
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Run on the thread at the eye and take down round the bend in touching turns.
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Cut a narrow strip from the long side of a sheet of Thin Skin using pinking shears. Cut off the last tooth on the resulting strip to create a narrow tying-in tag.
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Catch in the tag with the straight edge of the Thin Skin at the top and bind down with touching thread turns.
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Tie in a length of floss, take the thread forward to the front of the abdomen and build a smooth body with floss wraps. Tie in and trim off the excess.
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Wrap the Thin Skin over the underbody with each wrap overlapping the previous one by about 70% to allow the points to form overlapping scales. Vary the tension as you wind to stagger the points on each wrap to accentuate the scaly texture. Continue wrapping up to the thread, tie in and trim away the excess.
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Cut a 10cm length of organza ribbon, trim a 5-6mm strip from one edge and strip out all the long fibres. Cut off the short fibres from 1cm to create a tag and tie this in immediately in front of the abdomen with the short organza fibres pointing down.
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Wind the organza up to just behind the hook eye, tie in, trim off the excess and whip finish.
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With a pair of scissors lying along the shank trim off all the organza fibres from the top and sides of the thorax leaving just the fibres underneath to represent legs.
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Take a black Sharpie pen and swipe the side of the point along the abdomen from the thorax to the back working around the fly with successive strokes in the same direction so that the pen skips over the scales highlighting the texture.
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Colour the thread at the head and seal with superglue or head cement.
You could tie Pangolins with one or more wraps of lead foil along the hook shank. However I prefer to fish them unweighted using a heavy tungsten beaded fly to control the fishing depth allowing the Pangolin to waft around in the current looking helpless and highly edible. Fishing a two fly cast like this on a short line is a great way to quickly search turbulent currents and pocket water along braided channels for fish hunting for food washed out of the pebbles and gravel. If you are fishing shallow water then putting the Pangolin on the point with a heavy nymph on a dropper above gives the best depth control for both flies. Alternatively try putting a heavy beaded jig hook pattern on the end of your tippet and then attach the Pangolin to a length of tippet tied to the hook eye.
Nick Thomas lives in South Wales. He started fly fishing on Scottish hill lochs many years ago and continues to design, tie and fish flies for trout, carp, bass and anything else that’s going.