Nick Thomas has the perfect fly to compliment the pattern he showed us last month. As ever it is something a little different
Early in January on a beautiful crisp clear winter’s day I went down to the Taff to fish. Ice crunched in the shallows as I waded in, sunlight shimmered through the clear water on the gravel and pebbles and a kingfisher darted past in an iridescent streak. I smiled for the pleasure and privilege of being out fishing on such a day.
It was not always so. I’ve lived within walking distance of this iconic river for over thirty years. In the past I’d walked and cycled along its banks, but fishing? It was not inviting. In the past the Taff ran black with coal dust with 100,000 tons of colliery waste washed downstream every year. The river was essentially devoid of life with coal dust and other pollutants coating the riverbed and banks for many miles. The decline of the Taff was recorded as early as 1833 with George Agar Hansard, author of ‘Trout and Salmon fishing in Wales’ reporting a reduction in fish taken as the river suffered the impacts of the burgeoning iron and coal industries. For the following century and a half the river was a dying and then dead black sewer.
Following industrial decline in the Welsh valleys the river slowly came back to life with each successive winter’s floods clearing out the industrial waste and toxins. There’s still the odd rusted length of steel colliery cable embedded in the bank as a reminder of the old days, but the transformation over recent decades is quite incredible. The Taff is now a beautifully clean river with a great variety of invertebrate life supporting good populations of brown trout and grayling as well as a wide variety of coarse fish including large barbel. The salmon have come back in numbers as well and draw quite a crowd of passing dog walkers and cyclists to watch them jumping the weir at Radyr.
So now standing in the clear water of the Taff trundling a set of nymphs along the riverbed a check in the downstream progress of the braided leader can potentially signal the attention of a wide range of fish. On this January day it was grayling I was after and grayling it were that took my nymphs and came to the net showing their vivid colours in the winter sunshine.
In the last issue of ESF I wrote about my Czojo nymphs which I use on the point of a 2 or 3 fly cast for Czech nymphing. To complement the heavy point fly the droppers on these casts carry lighter flies to allow them to work higher in the water, rising and falling as they swing round in the current. I used to use small copper or brass beads to tie these flies but got frustrated with beads that either wouldn’t fit on my hooks, fell off over the eye or had sharp edges likely to cut through tippet. Then I discovered tungsten neck rings. These can be fitted round the bend of virtually any hook and sit very nicely up against a plastic bead to form a neat weighted head for flies tied on jig or conventional hooks. If you want a heavier fly the rings can be stacked along the shank. Different sizes of rings can be used to produce a tapered weighted thorax. In fact they offer a very versatile addition to the fly tiers armoury for use across many different patterns – one ring to bind them all.
After a bit of messing about at the vice using the tungsten rings with some plastic beads, wire and organza the Tungring nymph emerged and has worked very nicely for me on the Taff.
Hook Hanak H 400 BL jig hook size 12 or14
Thead Veevus 10/0 white coloured with marker pen
Head Plastic bead
Collar Bidoz tungsten neck ring
Tail Organza fibres stripped from ribbon
Body Tying thread
Rib 1 Copper wire (plain or coloured)
Rib 2 Stripped organza ribbon
Thorax Hare’s Ice Dub
- Slip on a bead and a tungsten ring with the open face of the ring facing the bead.
- Run on the tying thread behind the ring and build up turns to lock the ring and bead in place.
- Cut a 10cm length of organza ribbon and trim a 3-5mm strip from one side. Strip out the long fibres and fold a few fibres in half around the tying thread. Tie down along the shank with touching turns to the bend and then trim the tail fibres to length.
- Trim off the short organza fibres from 1cm of the stripped ribbon to form a tag and catch in at the bend with two turns of thread. At the same point tie in a length of copper wire.
- Bind down the organza and wire working up the body building up a tapered body shape with the thread turns.
- Wind the wire forward in open turns, tie in behind the collar and break off the excess by bending back and forth. Colour the thread body as required with a permanent marker pen.
- Spiral the organza forward following the wire rib so the short organza fibres are pushed out from the body by the wire. Tie in behind the collar and trim off the excess.
- Apply a small amount of dubbing to the thread and build a short thorax behind the tungsten collar.
- Swipe the tying thread with a dark coloured marker, smear with superglue and whip finish between the thorax and the collar.
Many variations are possible using different colour combinations of wire, organza and dubbing to give a suggestion of the various nymphs present in your river.
A rummage around Hobbycraft or other craft stores will yield you a great variety of plastic or glass beads suitable for using with tungsten neck rings. You can use black or metallic beads or use a coloured bead to include a pink, orange or red hotspot. A pink bead combined with a vivid pink organza tail and rib gives a very useful attractor pattern for the ladies.
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.