Deschutes Angler: Patterns

5/18/2013

Dark Spey Skater
By Amy Hazel

The Dark Spey Skater is a dry fly/steelhead skater pattern developed by and tied in this example by John Hazel. This is a small skater which works particularly well on the Deschutes and other western rivers where steelhead come freely to the skating fly. The small bit of foam on the top of this fly serves a dual purpose - added visability for the angler and a bit of floatation for the fly.

The Dark Spey Skater is one of the flies in John's PFD skater series in which each of the traditional steelhead skaters has been modified to "wear" a personal floatation device - which is typically a bright piece of 2-3 mm foam. The reason we need to outfit these skaters with life jackets is that the fly spends most of its time in the water when Spey casting because there is no flase casting between presentations to dry the fly off.

This fly can be tied up in many different variations of body color and foam color to make it your own unique creation. Click on any of the small pictures to enlarge them.

Step 1 Start off with a Partridge Single Wilson Model 01 hook in size 10. Using this light wire hook is critical to the skating success of this fly - not just any hook in a size ten will be light enough to make the skater dance. Keep the hook size at an 8 or a 10. So many steelhead skaters are too big these days for a steelhead to really get a hold of, which results in the angler getting boils but few solid hook-ups.

Cut a bit of moose body hair and stack the tips in a hair stacker. Tie in the moose body hair with the tips extending out over the back of the bend of the hook. The length of the tail is 1 1/2 times the gap (the distance between the point of the hook and the shank of the hook). On this fly John is using 6/0 black Uni thread.

Step 2 After you have tied the moose tail in, you are going to cut a healthy chunk of moose hair off of your piece of moose hide and clean out the underfur to reduce bulk. Once the under fur is cleaned out, put the moose hair in a stacker tips down and tap the stacker to get nice even tips. A large stacker is really a luxury when dealing with big chunks of moose hair.

Tie the tips out over the eye of the fly so that they extend out beyond the eye of the fly by about the distance of the hook gap. You can see in this photo that John cut the butt ends to length so that when he laid them on the hook to tie them in, they abutted exactly with the butt ends of the tail. This give you a smooth body surface upon which you will be tying the body.

Step 3 First tie in a strand of medium holographic copper tinsel - this will be the ribbing. Next tie in seven or eight strands of peacock herl by their tips. Make sure the peacock herl is nice and full and long enough to wrap forward. You will twist the strands into a rope before you wrap them forward to make the body.

Wrap the peacock strands forward (you should still have a little bit of the exposed thread-wrapped butt ends of the wing), tie the peacock down with the thread and trim. Wrap the holographic copper tinsel forward making five even wraps.

Step 4 Tie in a piece of 3mm foam in a color of your choice. The foam should be trimmed to approximately one inch long and an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch wide. Look at a six-sided pencil and try to cut the foam about as wide as one of the flat sides of that pencil. When you tie this foam in, you are tying it on top of the nice peacock body that you just finished. Not to worry, you are going to be tying in more peacock herl to make it look nice again!

After the foam is tied in, you can use the strands of peacock that you just trimmed from your previous step- if they are still long enough to wrap forward. If not, get new peacock herl and tie it in tips first.

Step 5 Wrap the peacock herl forward over the thread wraps that were necessary to tie your foam down. Tie the herl right up to the point where the moose hair starts to angle upwards. Now fold the foam over the top of the peacock herl and part the moose hair down the middle by pulling the foam down tightly through the hair. Tie the foam down tightly just behind the eye of the fly. The moose hair shoudl now be parted evenly and splayed backwards like the airplane wings on a stealth bomber.

Step 6 Tie off the foam and trim it leaving a little nub of foam out over the eye of the hook. Pull the little nub back and whip finish the head. Apply a drop of head cement to the thread. Use your fingers to slick the wings back and to tidy up the moose hair.

Click photos to enlarge

Products for this fly:
•	Partridge Single Wilson Hooks
•	Uni 6/0 Tying Thread
•	Moose Body Hair
•	Holographic Tinsel
•	Peacock Herl
•	Thin Fly Foam

Click Here to buy this fly!

504 Deschutes Ave, Maupin, OR 97037
541-395-0995 . EMAIL

Site Map

� 2004, Deschutes Angler.