Last week, our buddy Stuart Foxall gave us a great tying tip on a better way to create dubbing balls when tying intruder style flies. Stuart is a commercial fly tyer/designer for Aqua Flies, and is a master at constructing modern intruder style flies (among many, many, other patterns). When Stu takes to the vise at Alaska West, it is not uncommon for a crowd to form around him.. Seriously! Well, Stuart was kind enough to fill us in on another great tip to make tying the Intruder a little quicker and neater as well. Thanks again Stu!
The Intruder Without the Dubbing Loop
Most flies that are tied in Europe don’t use dubbing loops. We mainly use the normal twist method between the thumb and finger. So when I saw that most intruders use a dubbing loop to flare the supporting hair I knew that it would take quite some time to tie each fly properly. At the time, I was also using polar bear quite a bit, which is very slippery in the tying silk and therefore not very effective tied in a dubbing loop. An easier way to use polar bear effectively is to use very fine wire as the dubbing loop material (but that’s another secret out of the bag).
In order to tie flies quicker but still be effective I had to come up with an easier method. As with most things in fishing it would appear that there is nothing new in this world. In fact, the Scandinavians have been using the technique for many years when tying their ‘Templedog’ flies (or sometimes called “Fat Back”). I just had to tie the hair in backwards and fold it back over itself. This way, It takes only a few seconds to produce and hasn’t left me with a clumpy tying in point that is sometimes produced with a clumsy dubbing loop.
No dubbing loop necessary! Check out the step-by-step below.
I then pull out some of the underfur to help keep the translucent look of the fly.
Would have enjoyed seeing steps 5-24 that represented the entire fly being tied 🙂 otherwise what I did see was great information for an effective fly pattern
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Thank you for sharing!!!! I find,especially when using Arctic Fox, I use too much material making my dubbing loop. As you know arcti fox absorbs water ang gets heavier the more it gets wet!
Sure thing Walter! Glad you found it helpful. We couldn’t agree more, since we learned this method, we haven’t put Arctic Fox in a dubbing loop again! Thanks for reading!