feathers as fly's

[youngfisher]

Hi all just woundering if you could use feathers as fly's if you were to snip them off the rig
Cheers
Darragh

[cathalger]

Hi,

Feathers would make perfectly good lures to fish on a fly rod for an awful lot of sea angling needs, but the one difficulty would be attaching the very thick cut end of the feather trace dropper to your leader. Feather trace nylon is usually well in excess of 20lb breaking strain, sometimes 40lb bs.

It would be difficult to knot to a fly leader due to its thickness and also as the dropper length would be limited even if it were cut tight to the knot. If the feathers have eyes your on to a winner, just tie them to the leader but if they got spade eye hooks youre going to have to make use of the trace dropper , the knot of which attaches the hook AND the feathers to the trace.

One way round it would be to try to form a loop in the stout nylon of the trace dropper, you could form a loop in it with a figure of 8 knot, if there was sufficient length to do so, after cutting the dropper from the trace as far away from the hook as possible????

Another figure of 8 in the end of your leader would allow for a loop to loop attachment, a very robust and reliable way to attach lures of any kind.

Any kind of line joining knot eg blood knot is going to be hard with the little line you have to work with on the feather itself, loop to loop is far stronger than a knot anyway. The only way to get more line for tying a knot is to undo the knots on the trace and the line gained would be horribly kinked from having been in a knot already.

Hope this hasnt confused you, I think Ive confused myself!

If you are a fly tyer, or you know a fly tyer, a tidier way to form loops in the stout bit of line coming off the feather would be to whip a loop in it with fly tying thread and super glue the whipping., IE create an eye to attach to. I know exactly where youre coming from, I often looked at hokeyes and things and thought they be nice to fish on the fly rod, some of those tiny shrimp lures would be great for it.

[JimH]

One of the very first 'flies' I cast was a large hookai feather/luminous body cut from a 3 set rig - caught a lot of fish on it - pollack mackerel and even some bass - go for it!

[Der Baron]

Here's something I threw together last year, managed quite a few Pollack on them. Although I did add a bit to them. I tied a loop in the on the snood end to attach to my leader, as Cathal suggests, but they are Macky feathers......http://www.sea-angling-ireland.org/bull ... =9&t=28567

[youngfisher]

Cheers lads il have to try this shortly and hopefully get a few fish
Cheers
Darragh