Low Resolution (click) | | About dry flies in general and parachute mayfly duns in particular, if you sort a list of design-goal attributes according to their overall relative importance, you might end up with a list that looked something like the following:
| Fishermen like to buy it | |
| | Fish like to bite it |
| | Is fast and easy to tie |
| | Is durable |
| | Floats well |
| | Is a flexible design
(no material choice or construction technique should limit other design choices for the fly as a whole) |
| | Is realistic |
| | Is beautiful |
You might quibble with that version of the importance sorting. Some readers might want to move realism a little higher up in importance. Others might like to take "fishermen like to buy it" out the list entirely. But the importance hierarchy does exist, even if there is no consensus on the details.
creative fly designers can, in other words, make valuable contributions to the art, even at the least important criteria levels--like beauty and realism--as long as enhancing beauty or realism doesn't subtract value from any of the more important goals, higher up in the importance hierarchy. The corollary should be equally obvious: the higher up in the list any hypothetical design change makes its mark, the more important the new design is.
So if you could design a new parachute mayfly dun that was:
- No harder to tie than traditional parachutes
- Makes the fly float better
- Loses nothing in durability
- No longer requires a stiff post wing on the top of the fly
(so now you can use CDC or duck flank fibers, or sparsely tied
and widely splayed synthetics for the wing instead of a stiff post)
- Is more realistic, because the parachute hackle fibers are
mounted horizontally, on the bottom side of the thorax,
where the legs of the real insect are.
- Results in a handsomer fly (if it looks better to the tier anyway)
......if so, how much would that be worth? We probably didn't make a fly that catches more fish, and we didn't gain or lose any ground on the speed of tying issue. So the emergence of this new fly isn't going to spawn any fireworks displays. Still, this is a design idea I've been working on for a long time. The first bottom-mounted parachute article I ever published was in Dick Surette's Fly Tyer magazine in 1979. That first fly worked, but it was too difficult and time consuming to tie for widespread use. I published another 'BMP Dun' article in Fly Fisherman in the early 1990s where I described a tying procedure that improved the BMP's production efficiency some. But not a lot. And that design only worked with a particular foam body techique. This latest paranormal design is not only flexible (it works with almost any concievable wing and body combination), it is no harder to tie than a traditional top-mounted parachute, at least for flies size 16 and larger. It does improve floating performance some and I do like the way it looks. This is one of my favorite flies. Always has been.
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Tails
Woodduck and CDC
Mount wing
TEFLON cross
Attach hackle
Add Dubbing
Done 1
Para Normal Pmd
Done 2
Size 20 Bmp Bwo
Alternate Abdomen