“So simple to tie but oh so deadly!"
I’ve always been a firm believer that the very best fishing flies tend to be quite simple. That’s not to say the they are easy to tie well but it does mean that anyone can have a go and decent tiers can knock them out like pop.
Here’s one of the best salmon flies you can tie and it can be adapted to any pattern. You don’t need a ton of materials and it keeps tying down to just a few minutes. Indeed, the longest part of the process if you are using a tube fly design, is preparing the tube.
For many years, I have been a huge fan of natural, translucent fur that allows light to pass through. This makes the fly more illusory and adds a natural touch of sparkle. Typically, polar bear is my first choice and I love seals fur too. I love the way that light passes through these flies in a way that it can’t with synthetic, reflective materials. I shared my thoughts years ago with Andy Eriksen and we began to tie more and more flies incorporating polar bear and similar furs.
To our delight, we discovered that polar bear makes the most amazing underwing being stiffer than the softer furs such as Fox, that can be stacked above and blended with it. It was Andy who dispensed with using head hackles and throat hackles to using polar bear both for the underwing of the top wing and the throat of the fly. The semi-stiff fibres are tied in a halo around the fly and then blended with short hanks of seals fur and a touch of flash blended in. The stiffer polar bear supports the lighter materials and prevent the wing tangling. It’s a simple, almost crude tie but the end result is stunning. The natural and scruffy look of Andy’s flies has always found favour with the fish and I believe that the Halo concept makes tying really nice salmon flies very easy.
The images below show how the polar bear halo is tied around the tube, followed by hanks of seals fur dubbing with flash blended in which is built around the structure of the halo. The top wing, built over the polar bear and dubbing canopy, completes the fly. Very simple to tie!
