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Here is a question and a fly design contest:
Well, ok. This might be a rigged contest, because I think I've already got it won. In fact I think maybe I now have the best fly I've come up with so far, at least in terms of projected ability to catch fishermen at the fly bin. Background: About dry flies in general and parachute mayfly duns in particular, if you sort a list of design-goal attributes according to their overall relative importance, you might end up with a list that looked something like the following: Fish like to bite the fly Speed and ease of tying Floating performance Overall design flexibility (no new construction technique should not limit material choices for the fly as a whole). Realism Beauty You might quibble with the above importance sorting--some readers might want to move realism a little higher up in the sorted importance list. But the hierarchy does exist, even if there is no consensus on the details. Another way of looking at the above is to say the fly designer can make a valuable contribution to the art even at the lowest, least important design goal levels, like beauty and realism, as long as the new fly design doesn't subtract value from any of the other attribute levels further up in the overall importance hierarchy. The corollary should be equally obvious: the higher up in the list any hypothetical design change is made, the more important the new design is. So here is my question: if you could design a new parachute mayfly dun that was: 1) At least a little faster and easier to tie than a traditional parachute 2) Makes the fly float at least a little better 3) No longer requires a stiff post wing on the top of the fly (so now you can use CDC or duck flank fibers, or sparsely tied and widely splayed synthetics for the wing instead of a stiff post) 4) Is more realistic, because the parachute hackle fibers are mounted horizontally, on the bottom side of the thorax, where the legs of the real insect are. 5) Results in a handsomer fly (well, let's just say I think it looks better) .......how much would that be worth? I've been making flies like that look like that for a long time. The first bottom-mounted parachute article I ever published was in Dick Surette's Fly Tyer in 1979. I had another one published in Fly Fisherman in the early 1990s. But those flies were not in any way fast and easy to tie. In fact, until recently, the bottom-mounted parachute flies I did make, although nice to look at, were so time consuming to make they amounted to no more than irrelevant fly tying amusements. The fact that articles like that (about fancy-looking but hard to make mayflies) were publishable at all says more about the magazines than the fly tier. But that's another subject. So I'll ask the question again in slightly modified form: if you could make a bottom mounted parachute mayfly that did indeed simultaneously and beneficially effect all of design goals 1-5 above, at least a little in some categories and maybe a lot for others, how much would that be worth? Does that sound like a fly you'd like to make, and fly you'd like to fish with? |
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