Kelly Galloup’s Sunken Spinner

This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Kelly Galloup’s Sunken Spinner.

This fly pattern was originally found in his book entitled Cripples and Spinners (2001), which you can purchase from his fly shop or by clicking the link to purchase from Amazon.

Many of you already know about spinner falls, the last stage of a mayfly’s life. In fact, I wrote a post about it – Importance of Mayfly Spinners where you can see more mages of spinners like this.

Trout key on spinners as the mayfly falls to the water in it’s final phase of life. A Rusty Spinner works well in this circumstance, but Kelly developed the fly to be fished subsurface to imitate a drowned mayfly spinner sinking through the water column.

The fly pattern in his Cripples and Spinners book shows wings splayed sideways, but he now likes to tie some flies with vertical wings. He explains in his fly tying video about the different wing positions as they sink and the how their translucent wings tend to fold close to their body underwater. His fly imitates this effect.

I don’t know if I agree with him about wing placement. I would describe his fly as tied “in the round”, meaning it would look roughly the same as you look at it from different angles.

The original Kelly Galloup’s Sunken Spinner fly pattern used a dubbed body and hen hackle to tie the fly, but more recently has started using a biot body and Hungarian Partridge.

Kelly is a stickler for detail and has developed a well-earned reputation for quality flies. He is known for his streamers and If you are a streamer fly fisher, be sure to purchase some of his flies at Galloup’s Slide Inn.

If you like Kelly’s flies, here are a few other Throw Back Thursday Flies I’ve featured: Galloup’s Compara Spinner, Galloup’s Zoo Cougar, Galloup’s T & A Leech, Troutsman Hex, Circus Peanut Articulated Streamer.

Enjoy…stay home, stay safe!