The Soft Sell

They’re not much on looks. The uninitiated would describe them as too wispy, scraggly, gaunt, bedraggled, or even ugly. What really counts, though, is how they appear to trout—and that is another matter.

My introduction to soft-hackles came almost 40 years ago at the end of a trip to Scotland. My Uncle John was “a wee past fishing age” as he put it, but he and his cronies knew their way around lochs and running waters alike. Seeing me off at Prestwick Airport, he handed me an Altoids tin full of flies, instructing me to “Try these back in the States.”

On the flight home, I opened the tin to find 18 flies stuck into white foam strips glued to the bottom of the container. There was nothing to them. The bodies were made of thread or floss and ribbed with fine wire. Most had little fur bumps for thoraxes, and all were hackled sparsely. Not impressed, I arrived home, put the flies in the top pocket of my fishing vest, and forgot all about them.

Three years later, I was striking out on the Beaverkill. Trout were working the top within easy range, but they wanted nothing to do with the Adams and Blue-winged Olive patterns I was pitching to them. Even tiny ants and beetles wouldn’t work.

Thinking that my leader was too heavy, I reached into my top vest pocket for 6X tippet material and accidentally banged the tin of soft-hackles. (Uncle John must have run out of patience watching from on high.) I switched to lighter tippet, and knowing that I could do no worse, I tied on what I learned later was a Partridge and Olive and cast to a nice brown that had spurned my previous efforts.

The fly drifted just under the film for 2 or 3 feet, and then the trout pounced. He clamped down, shook his head in surprise, and promptly broke me off. I’m not sure which of us was more shocked. I went back to 4X tippet and tied on another soft-hackle. Suddenly, fishing was easy. I’d place the fly about 3 feet from a rising fish and let the current swing the slightly sunk soft-hackle directly in front of the trout. Most of the fish hit just as the fly came into their view, but once, when I was distracted by another fisherman working his way toward me, a trout struck hard while the fly was hanging motionless directly downstream. At that, the fellow quickened his pace.

He reached me just as I was unhooking the fish and asked what I was using. I showed him the bedraggled soft-hackle I had just removed from the trout’s jaw. Incredulous, the old guy looked at me sternly and said, “Don’t fun with me, son!”

I pulled out the Altoids tin and plucked a fly for him, explaining that at first I hadn’t thought much of them myself. He grumbled a quick thanks, went ashore, and moved about a hundred yards above me. His luck soon started to match mine, with a few of the browns putting a bend in his bamboo rod. When I looked up again he was heading back my way. The crotchetiness was gone from his voice. “Sonny,” he said, “I’ll give you five dollars apiece for every fly in that tin.”

That was a lot of money in those days, but I declined, mentioning their sentimental value and explaining that the man who knew the most about them was long gone. We waded ashore, and grateful for the chance to examine the flies, he seemed to be burning each pattern into his brain. All he could tell me was that the thread and floss bodies were made of real silk and that the hackle feathers looked like they’d come from “grouse, sparrows, or starlings.” Well, he was right about the silk and the starling feathers, but what he guessed was “grouse or sparrows” turned out to be gray- and brown-phase Hungarian partridge feathers.

That first time fishing soft-hackles changed my fly fishing forever. When all else failed, the soft-hackles would almost always work. Drag—the bane of dry-fly anglers—became a help instead of a hindrance. When I learned to use mending and controlled swings to get the trout to see only the fly first, they’d smash the soft- hackle with confidence. I attempted to duplicate some of Uncle John’s creations, but mine never seemed to work as well. (There was no Internet in those early days, so I wasn’t having much luck uncovering information.)

Then in 1975 Sylvester Nemes published The Soft-Hackled Fly, a work as slim and as useful as the flies it described. Unlike many of the book’s initial readers, who no doubt needed plenty of convincing, I was already a believer. But now I finally had the additional information necessary to get my own soft-hackles looking just right. I now own all of Mr. Nemes’s books on soft-hackled flies and recommend them to novices and experts alike. [Nemes’s first book is no longer in print but his expanded and revised The Soft-Hackled Fly and Tiny Soft Hackles: A Trout Fisherman’s Guide (Stackpole, 2006) is available. The Editor.]

These flies work but they must be tied and fished correctly. The tying is simplicity itself. Just as the most effective streamers are tied with sparse wings, soft-hackles must be sparse bordering on flimsy. Forget the “more is better” approach. Use a sewing needle to split the silk floss into three or four strands to reduce body bulk and tie with fine thread such as Pearsalls Gossamer Silk. Rib with the smallest copper, gold, or silver wire, and don’t overdo the thoraxes. All you want is a tiny bump of fur to give the hackle something to work against in the current. If the wispy hackles mat down against the shank, the flies lose their magic.

Starling, grouse, and partridge feathers are common for soft-hackles. Some tiers also use Indian hen capes. Feathers for a soft-hackle should be soft and undulate in the current to imitate the bedraggled look and movement of emerging caddis or mayflies, exactly the opposite of the stiff hackles desirable for dry flies. Limit yourself to 11/2 to 2 turns of hackle. Some tiers strip one side of the feather just to keep things extra sparse.

Many of the best feathers have a tiny transitional zone where the most delicate fibers are half fluff and half fiber. These impart excellent squirmy movement, so don’t remove them along with the actual fluff. I use smooth needle-nose pliers to flatten the hackle stem before winding it, so the barbules stand away from the shank and wind more evenly. Add a small, neat head and the fly is done. (A smidgen of dubbing wax keeps the silk thread tight in the whip-finish and eliminates the need for head cement.) Use regular #12-18 dry-fly hooks for soft-hackles that are to be fished “damp” as emergers. In early spring, late autumn, and winter use heavy-wire, wet-fly hooks. Bodies tied with colored wire, bead heads, or even both get the soft-hackles deeper, but the sparse and wispy rule still applies for the thoraxes and hackles.