Grayling Duster

[Traditionalist]

Hook: 16 to 12 (16 Drennan Carbon Specimen shown).

Thread. Pale yellow 6/0 Danvilles flymaster

Body: Mixed dark and medium yellow hare guard hair You may use body or mask or ear hair.

Hackle: Badger with black tips.

This is really a variant on the "Grey Duster" which is dressed with blue rabbit underfur, but I got fed up of them sinking too quickly! So I used hare guard fur. This is my standby winter Grayling dry fly, but it works very well indeed for trout, and especially for Dace! It imitates a hatching midge. One may vary the shade of the body to almost black using the appropriate hare fur. I mainly use the mixed version as shown. I have some with relatively short hackles, and some with longer hackles as shown. What I use depends on conditions. You may treat the whole fly with floatant, or just the hackle, so that the abdomen sinks into the film. The longer hackles float better in rough water.These flies are difficult to see in the film, when the abdomen is sunk,so you have to know where your fly is!

[daring duffer]

Hook: 16 to 12 (16 Drennan Carbon Specimen shown).

Thread. Pale yellow 6/0 Danvilles flymaster

Body: Mixed dark and medium yellow hare guard hair You may use body or mask or ear hair.

Hackle: Badger with black tips.

This is really a variant on the "Grey Duster" which is dressed with blue rabbit underfur, but I got fed up of them sinking too quickly! So I used hare guard fur. This is my standby winter Grayling dry fly, but it works very well indeed for trout, and especially for Dace! It imitates a hatching midge. One may vary the shade of the body to almost black using the appropriate hare fur. I mainly use the mixed version as shown. I have some with relatively short hackles, and some with longer hackles as shown. What I use depends on conditions. You may treat the whole fly with floatant, or just the hackle, so that the abdomen sinks into the film. The longer hackles float better in rough water.These flies are difficult to see in the film, when the abdomen is sunk,so you have to know where your fly is!

Mike,
Nice fly. How would you rate the significance of the black tips?

Stefan

[Traditionalist]

I can't really. Sometimes hackles with black tips seem to work better than those without but it's very subjective. I mostly use hackles with black tips on a lot of flies, but you can not always get them.  You can touch the tips of hackles with a black marker if you are careful, but I am not sure it makes enough difference to bother.

TL
MC

[daring duffer]

Thank you. I will tie a few with badger and a few with "pale" coch-y-bonddhu and maybe try the black marker too.

Stefan

[Black-Don]

It imitates a hatching midge.

I recently tied up some Griffiths Gnats for this purpose but might just add a few of these to the fly box too !