 Tying Instructions |
Materials:
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Pheasant Tail Soft Hackle  |
Materials:
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BH Pheasant Tail Soft Hackle  |
Materials:
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Yvon's Soft Hackle Pheasant Tail  Tying Instructions |
Materials:
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The Pheasant Tail & Partridge Soft Hackle probably has it's roots during the time of Dame Juliana Berners in 1496 when she wrote a treatise describing the only fly pattern used within England at that time, a wet fly. Nymph patterns came about in the mid 1800's in England and Frank Sawyer, the riverkeeper of the Avon river in southern England, has been attributed as the developer of the the modern Pheasant Tail Nymph (PTN) in the early 1900's. Some years before Frank Sawyer tied up his PTN, another English flyfisherman, George Skues, was already tying a version of the Pheasant Tail Soft Hackle. These English patterns utilized Pheasant Tail for both the thorax and the body. The Soft Hackles fell out of favor with the writings of F.M. Halford in the 1880's proclaiming the superior performance of dry flies by matching the hatching insects on the water with a fly of similar color and size. As a result, many of the chalkstreams of England became "dry fly only" and you could only fish to a rising trout. The preference for dry flies continued into the United States with the writings of Theodore Gordon in 1890, who was known as "The Halford of the USA". Gordon received a number of dry flies from Halford and created his own that were suited to our streams, the Gordon and the Quill Gordon. It wasn't until the 1970's that the Soft Hackles, as touted by Sylvester Nemes, became an important pattern for many of today's fly fishermen. Today, the Soft Hackle is recognized as an excellent fly pattern, particularly within riffles and runs of less than 4 feet in depth. It is primarily used with a downstream cast utilizing the currents for movement.