Get Back to the Vise

We’ve been home a couple weeks from our fly fishing road trip and I need to get back to the vise. After being gone a month, I’ve missed tying flies.

I always take my fly tying vise and a few materials with me when I travel and tied a couple dozen Improved Sparkle Duns like the one shown above and several Purple Haze during our trip. They worked very well on the Madison River.

Here I am tying flies a few moth imitations along the Grey’s River, WY.

For some reason, I frequently reach for a Sparkle Dun to imitate any mayfly I see on the water. It’s my favorite fly to fish and I enjoy tying them. But finding quality deer hair used for the wing has become more and more of a problem for me.

Some patches have underfur that is difficult to remove and prevents the hair from stacking properly. In addition, my climate causes a lot of static that makes the fibers stick to each other, again preventing them from stacking properly.

I’ve used small and medium Dr Slick hair stackers for years and they’ve worked really well. But I found a couple patches of very short deer hair to use for size 18 and 20 flies and I was having problems getting them to stack properly and get them out of the stacker.

While I was on the Madison River, I decided to stop at Galloup’s Slide Inn and purchase a new hair stacker. In fact, I splurged and purchased two swing stackers, a small and medium/small. Why two you ask? I tie a lot of size 12 – 20 flies.

Those are the new ones on the left. The Dr Slick brass stackers are on the right. As I recall, they are a small and medium sizes.

The swing stacker medium/small has a larger hole than the small, which allows more fibers to be stacked, which I found perfect to tie the size 14 and 16 flies.

Here is a link to Kelly Galloup’s YouTube channel where is talks about these stackers and the different sizes.

I tied several Sparkle Duns and I can’t believe how well the stacker does a great job!

Do you have problems stacking hair? It might be the hair stacker you use. Or perhaps you’re using the wrong hair. I wrote a post a few years back entitled Selecting the Proper Deer Hair to Tie Sparkle Dun and X Caddis Flies where I describe the properties I look for when tying these flies.

Here is a link to my RiverKeeper Flies YouTube channel where I demonstrate how I tie the fly.

And another video where I demonstrate how to tie the X Caddis. I go into more detail about good and bad deer hair for wings.

Enjoy…go fish!