Swandives

I’m a newcomer to fly tying, although I spent many hours watching my father tie flies when I was younger. I am really enjoying it, and there is immense satisfaction in finishing a fly. This one is a bead-head soft hackle nymph. I was intending to tie a bead-head black nymph, which is my very favourite wet fly; I caught my first trout on a black nymph, and have used it with particular success on the Swampy Plains River in NSW and Indi River on the boarder of NSW and Victoria, Australia. When the trout are sulking and won’t rise, they’ll still take a black nymph. But finding a simple, step-by-step guide for the complete novice proved more difficult than I thought it would. So I went with this one: a bead-head soft hackle nymph.

I am very keen to try it out as soon as possible. Here’s the fly part-way through:

A partially finished bead-head soft hackle

And this is the result.

The finished product

If you are a beginner to fly tying, I recommend the Orvis Fly-Tying Manual - How to Tie Eight Popular Flies by Tom Rosenbauer. It runs you through each step without assuming knowledge like so many fly tying books and the patterns (such as the soft hackle nymph pictured here) are simple enough that you aren’t likely to become discouraged.

The other brilliant thing for the novice is the enormous number of ‘how to’ videos on YouTube. Sometimes, just seeing something makes all the difference. I mastered the whip finish in minutes thanks to this one: