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parachute worth question......



 
 
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Old April 15th, 2006, 04:51 AM posted to rec.outdoors.fishing.fly.tying
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Default parachute worth question......

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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