Tying the Red Quill with Kelly Galloup 

td, you know it had been so long since I tied one that I forgot thats how to set them. Almost re did it to do it right but ran out of time. You are correct though that is how I should have done it. Thanks, Kelly

Oholi's, I use them a lot, they are great for these flies. Thanks for watching. KG

@@kellygalloup6073 i watch these videos daily... the day is not complete without one of yours videos. Cheers Vladimir 😃

The same could be said for an early Canadian angler such as George M. La Branche, who fished for trout and later did for salmon using the dry fly. I've read both of these authors from the earlier times, and they both come back to something very basic. It's about presenting to the fish an array of different shapes of fly. They were able to identify something about the psychology of the fish, or it's instinct that had to do with shape. And how fish would actually respond differently to different shapes put before them. Often one would have to show the fish a series of different shapes, in order for the fish to finally decide that it liked the initial shape the most. But it was about showing the fish alternatives. That is really the way in which these early dry fly men, took the basic lessons that they had learned from trout, and used them with salmon.

The reason that I mention it, is they decided to exaggerate the shapes also, in the case of angling for migratory species. Lee Wulff had a fly that he liked to present to the salmon, which was just a more exaggerated version of this classic style dry fly. It was a fly that could be made using Coq De Leon feathers, that are stiff, sharp and much longer than ordinary dry fly hackles. In order to exaggerate that effect, they would only wind the hackle on a quarter of the hook shank and leave the remainder of it bare. So, there was this tiny dry fly hook and this huge circular shaped hackle wound around the hook shank. This fly would do exactly like Kelly had described. It would sort of skuttle it's way over the surface of the water, like one of those parachute seeds that flies off in the wind and blows all over the place. The effect that the angler was trying to achieve, was like a dapping fly that would simply jump across the waves from crest to crest, and not spend a lot of it's time stationary in any one place.

The opposite to that kind of 'shape' of dry fly (in terms of the foot print that it has on the water surface from a fish's perspective), is a dry fly such as the Ant Acid pattern. That is a fly, that sort of glues itself tightly down on to the surface film - and does completely the opposite to what the Red Quill dry fly - or a more exaggerated version of the Red Quill classic Catskill dry fly pattern would do.

There's one kind of dry fly that was in evidence a lot in both the flies of George M. La Branche and Lee Wulff's fly boxes, and one which I've seen for many years in the fly boxes of the typical Irish lake angler. That is the sort of dry fly, that is made using a palmered hackle. It's what they'd term on the Irish lakes, a mouth full. I.e. It is a dry fly that is designed to be seen, because it presents to the fish underneath as quite a 'square' mass of hackle based float-ation material. And that is the point. The way that the palmered dry fly sits on the water, is such that there is a lot going on. It's almost as if several flies have got themselves stuck together in a bunch, and they've landed on the water. Indeed, in American dry fly fishing that is often achieved in small midge imitation patterns. Where the goal is, instead of imitation of the single nymph, it's considered useful to imitate a group of them, which the trout doesn't mind consuming as a bunch either.

I can't remember if I've seen this fly in Kelly's tutorials though, but something such as the Royal Wulff might be like that. Where a good half length of the hook shank is devoted to hackle feather that is wound around the hook shank in classic style. The ideal way to achieve that, and I don't know if many American tiers do it, is to actually wind two or three cock hackles at the same time. And the hackles don't all have to be the same colour either. Now that I think of it, the closest that Kelly has demonstrated to that, is actually the North Branch Caddis, where it was described as one quarter 'legs' and three quarters 'abdomen'. That is a little bit akin to the Wulff style of dry fly.