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Keough Tyer's Grade Capes / Quick Descent Dubbing / Tying Flies the Paraloop Way

Reviewed by Terry Lawton

With the onset of winter - at least in the northern hemisphere - and the closed season, it is time to start thinking about tying flies, both new patterns as well as regular favourites needed to stock-up fly boxes for next season, or a fishing holiday where fly fishing is in season. Terry Lawton has tried some new hackles and dubbing material as well as reading a new fly tying book.

Keough Tyer's Grade Capes

Good materials do make it so much easier to tie half-reasonable flies. They will work with you rather than you having to struggle to make them do what you want. This is never more true than winging and hackling flies. Good hackles cost money but it is usually money well spent.

The information on the packaging of Keough Tyer's Grade capes says they are "a grade of hackle designed to be used. An exceptional grade hackle at an affordable price. Unbeatable feather value. Be assured that this cape will tie the maximum amount of flies for the least amount of money. This product has flexible stems, great barb density and excellent feather counts from size 4 to size 22 and smaller. It possesses all the features of a great generic cape. Value that is represented in a Grade #1 cape for one third of the price." I have quoted the packaging at some length because it seems to me that this description sums-up these capes very well.

Lakeland Flytying made a grizzly and a dyed olive grizzly cape available for evaluation. The capes had an excellent range of feather size and the dyed cape seemed to be dyed very consistently. The capes are every bit as good as described and at a UK cost of £22.50, represent very good value for money, even though in the UK we always have to pay well over the odds for American products.

Lakeland Flytying is at www.lakesflyfishing.co.uk
Keough Hackle www.keough-hackle.com

Quick Descent Dubbing

Quick descent dubbing looks and feels like soft, fine steel wool or a kitchen scourer such as a Brillo pad. Whatever it is made from, it is easiest to describe it as very fine strands of dyed or anodised metal of some description. While this may not be technically accurate, I hope that it gives you a feel for what it is like. I have never used a dubbing material that is so easy to dub.

Although I hope that I am a reasonably competent, but still improving, fly tier, I often have trouble dubbing fly bodies unless I use a dubbing loop. But this material bends and folds round your tying thread because it does not have the springiness nor stiffness of most natural or synthetic dubbings and really could not be easier to use. Because the material bends so easily, it is very easy to dub it too tight. If you do this then you will have to spend a little time brushing it out to get a degree of shagginess and a nice buggy look. Many tiers will like the material's sparkle.

The material is called quick descent because it does not trap air so flies made with it will sink quickly. A weighted pattern will sink faster and therefore deeper, or nymphs can be tied unweighted but these too will sink. It could be the ideal material to use for nymphs that you want to fish just sub-surface.

The colours in the box supplied are brown, pale olive, copper, caddis green, gray, gold, black, red, olive, rust, golden orange and silver.

Quick Descent Dubbing is a new material that it well worth trying.

Supplied by Lathkill. Telephone: Int + 44 (0)1422-354444

Tying Flies the Paraloop Way

Is it possible to write a book on one method of tying flies? I suppose it is but Tying Flies the Paraloop Way by Ian Moutter is much more than a book on a single way of tying flies. It takes a while to discover what exactly the paraloop method is. The idea first came to the author in 1997 but like so many things in fishing, his idea was not the innovation that he thought it was but a development of techniques that were in use in the USA by fly tiers including Jim Cramer, Ned Long and Bob Quigley, to name but three. In the States it is known as the pullover or hackle stacker method.

The paraloop method is a way of tying flies that produces a particular profile, with no hackle below the hook shank. Ian Moutter reckons that the hook is placed ideally for hooking fish. It is not just another way of tying parachute flies, which can have a similar profile, but a more flexible and natural progression. A paraloop fly also has a dubbed thorax, unlike conventional tyings. The basic paraloop fly has a bunch of hackle pulled over the thorax area - somewhat similar in style to the wing case on a nymph - with all the hackle attached to the top of the hook shank by a hackle post.

The book is aimed at all levels of fly tiers and the first two chapters cover fly tying materials. tools and equipment. One piece of equipment said to be essential for the paraloop method is the gallows tool which not every fly tier will have in his tying kit. There is a lot of very good information in these chapters both for general fly tying and specifically for tying paraloop flies.

Tying a basic paraloop fly is well described and illustrated. And the black gnat paraloop looks to be a very good, buggy-looking little fly. The chapter of techniques for tying paraloops including an interesting method for tying splayed tails, each if which is made from a single hackle fibre or micro fibbet. As I have said already, the method is very versatile and is particularly well suited to tying emergers.

I am unhappy about a fly that is tied as distinctively as the Klinhåmer Special, to give it its full name, being bastardised into a Paraloop Klinkhamar (sic) Pale Watery Emerging Dun for example. To the best of my knowledge there has never been such a Klinkåmer Special and the paraloop version should be called something else.

To give a feeling of the breadth of this book, it is worth mentioning some of the chapter headings. As well as chapters on tools and equipment, materials, tying a basic paraloop fly and paraloop techniques, there are chapters on tying dry flies, emergers, buzzers, spent wing and wet flies, all using this method. Then we have a chapter on adding sparkle to paraloops, the paraloop in the hands of other tiers and its future. The book is rounded-off with an interesting photo gallery. In the appendices there is a glossary, list of materials, overcoming common problems and a list of useful addresses such as material suppliers.Finally, it is nice to see this website listed in the list of web sites in Appendix five.

This is a book that needs reading more than once. I found that I got a lot more out of it when I read it a second time, making notes for this review. I should point out that Ian Moutter wrote the book so that the tier can have it open at his side when tying flies.

Tying Flies The Paraloop Way by Ian Moutter. Published by Swan Hill Press, 191 pages at £30.00.