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Hi I'm Grant McClure, today we're going to be tying a woolly bugger fly.
Some of the basic tools you know that you're gonna be using,
You've got your bobbin which holds the thread and then your scissors which you pretty much you know used to cut things pretty self-explanatory.
And then your vise which is what holds your hook. So when I put my hook in my vise I usually put it so that there's a little bit of the point sticking out.
You kind of want it to hold right in the bend and I'll go ahead and get my thread started.
You notice that when I'm wrapping my thread on the hook I'm always wrapping away from myself.
And once I get you know a couple layers of thread on there I can just take my scissors and cut off this tag.
So the first step is going to be to add some of this wire and this will give the fly a little bit of weight.
Usually you want to cut that with the back of your scissors because if you cut it with the sharp end it'll dull your scissors overtime.
So what I'll do is go ahead and just start wrapping that on the shank of the hook.
And you know depending on how fast you want you want to sink you can do you know anywhere from three to eight wrap somewhere around there.
Some people actually will do what's called a bead head or a tungsten cone head or something on the front and that will help it sink quicker too.
So i'm just gonna wrap over that wire.
So the first material that we're gonna be using is it's called marabou and this is actually comes from Turkey quills.
And this one's been dyed black so i'll go ahead and pick out a marabou feather.
And this is going to be the tail of the fly. I want the tail to be about three-quarters the length of the shank.
As a general rule of thumb somewhere around there.
So I'm just wrapping that in, always wrapping away from myself until it's nice and secure.
And then you got your tag and you go ahead and snip that off.
And all that's going to get covered up with thread so it's okay if it looks a little ugly.
So once you've got your tail tied in the next step is tying some wire.
And this is just like a thin gold wire.This is going to be used to kind of hold everything together.
So just wrap that in. You'll notice that with this fly pretty much everything starts in the back and then will tend to sort of move it all forward.
So once that's tied in you can take a little bit of this hackle was what it's called.
So we'll pick out a hackle feather that we like.
Since this hooks a size 4 it's a little bit bigger hook, I'm gonna pick you know a bigger feather out of this patch
And once I find one that I like I'll just pull it out.
So what I'm doing now is just kind of flaring the hackle fibers out by just pulling it back with my fingers.
And then what I'll do is tie it in by the tip right to the back.
So the next step is gonna be to add some of this chenille and this comes in a lot of different colors but we're using this gold black color.
it's kind of like a pipe cleaner but they've taken out the metal.
And so what I'll do is actually just pull a little bit of this off and you can see it what comes out is this little thread.
And you can tie in by that thread.
So now I've got all my materials tied in the back what I'm gonna do is move it all forward.
So the first step is going to be to take your chenille that you tied in and wrap it forward.
And this is going to kind of form the body of the fly.
And once I get to the front I'll just tie it off by wrapping over it and cutting the tag.
Got my body, the next step is going to be to take your hackle feather and wrap that over the chenille.
And this kind of makes little legs in the fly so once I get that all forward,
I'll tie it off and snip the tag.
So next what we're going to do is take this gold piece of wire we tied it in and wrap this over the chenille and the hackle.
And that's just going to hold everything together.
And I like to kind of wiggle the wire as I'm wrapping it so that the hackle fibers can kind of get in between.
Try to get them nice and evenly spaced and this kind of gives the fly a segmented look.
Kind of like an insect or hellgrammite.
And once that's come all the way forward you can tie it off and snip the tag.
So what I'll do now is I'll take my scissors and just kind of go in between this wire,
And pull out some of those hackle fibers that might have got trapped when I was rapping it forward.
Just kind of pull everything back and then what I'll do is just half hitch,
And so the way you half hitch is you just kind of take it and make a loop.
And then I'll grab that loop and turn it over twice and then just slip it right over,
On the head of the fly here that I've made with thread and pull it tight
And what I can do is just snip that off and you can do two or three half hitches
And I usually add a little bit of a little bit of what's called head cement or super glue onto the end of the fly.
And that'll just help it stay together a little bit but that's a black willy bugger.
And that's a great fly, it's caught all kinds of fish, it's great trout fly, bass, yeah.
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