Fly Tier's Bench: A.K.'s Melon Quill

When I was a young man getting started in the fly-fishing industry, Archie Kenneth Best (1933–2025) was the mystical fly tier everyone looked up to. He’d been a prolific commercial tier for years, but it was when his friend John Gierach started casually mentioning him in many of his stories that his aura really started growing. 

I was a huge fan of John Gierach (1946–2024) and I still am to this day. The legendary A.K. Best is just as firmly entrenched in my consciousness. Sadly, both Colorado luminaries are no longer with us.

As an up-and-coming fly tier, I paid close attention to A.K.’s work and noticed the reverence that so many fly shop owners had for him and his flies. I aspired to be like him and hoped one day to meet him. I didn’t have to wait too long.

In the early 1990s I was working for Dick Reeves (the best boss I ever had) at Front Range Anglers in Boulder, Colorado, when a very nice old fella walked in, needing a fishing license. Keep in mind that I was in my early 20s at that time, and A.K. was probably around 60. Given my current age, I would like to retract my original appraisal of “old fella.”

I began the process, and when he handed over his ID, my mastery of the obvious quickly surmised that Archibald Kenneth Best was the guy everyone had been talking about. Coincidentally, at one time A.K. had co-owned Front Range Anglers with Dick Reeves.

I cannot say that I ever grew to know A.K. well, but we did interact throughout the years in the shop, at shows, and occasionally on the water. And from that first day, every time I ran into him he remembered my name. He was the quintessential gentleman, and I always looked forward to our encounters.

A.K. was one of the first tiers I knew who bucked the system. He took giant strides in tweaking traditional patterns. While so many commercial tiers made their living from pounding out copies of well-known flies, A.K. took things a few steps further. His quill-body series of flies elevated traditional patterns by adapting them to better match the naturals he was seeing on the water. Conventional proportions and rhetoric went out the window in Archie’s quest to build the perfect imitation. I believe this was one of the first forays into what became the future of fly tying—taking what we have now and enhancing it, making it better, and looking at it with respect for the past but a peek into the future as well.

I was a young commercial tier myself, and at the height of Archie’s reign, I read every word he wrote and tried to learn his methods and techniques. For a while there I went so far as to strip and dye my own hackle quills, sought out and finally found the coveted “winger” capes he recommended for dry-fly wings, and generally immersed myself in all things A.K.

When Fly Fisherman editor Ross Purnell pitched the idea to feature one of A.K.’s patterns, I jumped at the chance—while also silently wondering if I still had any of these materials on hand. Given that I am a fly-tying hoarder, I was pleasantly surprised (when I finally got the chance to dig through my office) to find not only several period-specific bags of perfectly stripped and dyed hackle quills, but also a smaller, further buried bag containing the webby, round-tipped winger necks A.K. spoke so highly of. I can’t say I wasn’t a little more than excited to get started.

All really good fly tiers have their own distinctive style, and A.K. was a crowning example of this. His dry flies, to my eye, stood out from the crowd with slightly longer and heavier tailing, those trademark stripped and dyed quill bodies, and his painfully perfect, upright, divided-hackle-tip wings. He developed a unique hackling method that splayed to the front and back, as opposed to the upright and rigid collars of the past. At first glance, they appeared to be tied . . . wrong. But upon closer inspection and research, they were tied better.

The Melon Quill is Archie’s version of the pinkish Pale Morning Duns you see on the Fryingpan River here in Colorado, a frequent haunt of A.K. Best and his friend John Gierach. A.K. used dark dun tailing and wings to perfectly match the naturals, and a combination of a thick, cream-colored quill wrapped concurrently with a slightly thinner pink quill to imitate the variegation on the natural insect’s abdomen. Finished off with a ginger hackle, the fly is a dead ringer.

While the sum of their parts far exceeded any individual component of Archie’s flies, it was the stripped and dyed quill body that made him famous. Archie developed the household bleach method we all still use to strip the fibers from the stems of inexpensive Chinese hackle feathers or leftover neck butts, then dye them to match the insects he saw on the water. While this process is probably a bit more complicated than many tiers these days would want to take on, I can tell you from experience that it’s well within your grasp, and a rewarding way to spend an afternoon. When you’re done, you end up with a big bag of quills in various colors, ready and waiting to twist up some A.K.-style bugs. There are worse things.

AK’s Melon Quill Recipe

• Hook: TMC 100
• Thread: Magpie Materials 72 Denier Deep Yellow
• Tail: Dark Dun Spade Hackle Fibers
• Wing: Medium Dun “Winger” Hen Cape Feathers
• Body: Stripped and Dyed Chinese Rooster Neck Quills
• Hackle: Ginger Rooster Neck Hackle

Step-by-Step Tutorial for AK's Melon Quill

1. Start the thread at about the 75% point and wrap a smooth thread base back to the bend. Tie in a relatively heavy clump of dark dun spade hackle fibers atop the bend of the hook, and wrap forward over the butts to the starting point. Clip the excess butt ends and continue the thread base all the way to the eye, then return the thread to the 75% point. Lift the tail a bit to kink it slightly upward, per A.K.’s style. 

2. Select two matched hen hackle tips from a “winger” hen cape. These feathers should be very webby and nicely rounded at their tips. 

3. Even up the tips, and oppose the two hen feathers so they curve away from each other. Preen the fibers downward at their bases so the tips are equal to an entire hook length, from the eye to the outside of the bend. Clip off the feathers at that point. 

4. Holding the tips between the thumb and forefinger of your thread hand, with the butts just peeking out of your grasp, place the matched feathers on top of the hook. Holding the bobbin in your materials hand, make a reverse pinch wrap, capturing the butt ends of the feathers at the 75% point on the shank. Before letting go, make a couple more pinch wraps to secure them.

5. The wings should now be perched flat on top of the shank and extend about a shank length beyond the tie-in point. Make a few flat thread wraps over the butt ends to smooth them off a bit. 

6. Pinch the wings in your fingertips and lift them up and back in a sweeping motion to gather all the fibers, leaving none sticking out of the front of the wing base. Build a small thread dam at the precise base of the wings to stand them upright. 

7. Carefully make a figure-eight wrap between the wings to divide them slightly to the sides. Anchor the thread in place behind the wings with a couple of tight, flat turns.

8. Select a pair of stripped hackle quills. The first cream-colored quill should be about twice the diameter of the second pink one. Align the tips of the quills to correspond with this measurement, and clip them even at that point. 

9. Tie in both quills just slightly behind the wings, with the pink quill on the bottom. Wrap back over both quills to just about one thread turn’s width from the tail. If you wrap all the way back to the base of the tail, the first turn of quill will disrupt the tail and render your creation useless . . . or at least ugly. Return the thread to the front of the quill tie-down. 

10. Begin wrapping both quills simultaneously, with the pink one following the cream. Make sure not to wrap over the base of the tail, and that there are no spaces in the wraps as you work forward to the starting point. The natural taper of the quills will mirror onto the body, creating the carrot-
shaped taper you’re after. 

11. Tie off the quills just behind the wings and clip the excess close. Wrap a few tight turns over the butt ends to smooth them off a bit in preparation for the hackle collar to come.

12. Strip the butt end of an appropriately sized rooster neck feather, and tie this in just front of the wings. Wrap over the base of the feather to the base of the wings to secure it in place, then return the thread to just behind the hook eye. A.K. took great pains to create a splayed hackle collar to better imitate the splayed natural mayfly’s legs, and I’ll do my best to describe it here. Bring the feather up around the hook for the first turn directly behind the wings, and then place the next one or two directly behind that one. Now take an angled wrap through the center of those wraps up to the wings, splaying the fibers a bit. 

13. Preen the wings back out of the way, and make two or three more turns in front of the wings, traveling toward the hook eye, then wrap the last turn of hackle through the middle of those wraps to further dishevel the collar. End with the last wrap just behind the eye, and tie off the tip of the feather firmly with the thread. You’ll notice that this hackle collar is considerably more askew than conventional wisdom would tell you to make it. But A.K.’s idea of splaying the fibers allows the fly to sit lower on the water and more accurately portrays the legs of the natural. 

14. Clip off the remaining tip of the feather flush, and build a smooth thread head to cover the stub. Whip-finish and add a drop of thin head cement to the thread head, as well as to the quill body.

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Charlie Craven co-owns Charlie’s Fly Box in Arvada, Colorado. He is the author of four books, most recently Tying Streamers: Essential Flies and Techniques for the Top Patterns (Stackpole Books, 2020).