The Original Recipe
Since the introduction of the true dry fly, mayfly patterns have almost invariably incorporated a hackle—either as a collar or in parachute form—but there is also an illustrious line of hackle-free dries that dates back to the 1940s. Great advances were made in the late 1960s and the 1970s, including the introduction of the Comparadun, and in recent years the availability of highly buoyant tying materials has led to further new developments.
MESSY BUT EFFECTIVE
One of the oldest no-hackle dries is the Haystack, created by Fran Betters of the Adirondacks in 1949 when he was still a teenager. He later became a professional flytier and the founding owner of the Adirondack Sport Shop in the town of Wilmington, NY, close to the AuSable River, around which his life revolved. The AuSable Wulff is another of his inventions.
A far cry from the neat and tidy Quill Gordon, the Haystack is, as its name suggests, a scruffy and indeterminate pattern, but its combination of a splayed deer hair tail, deer hair wing tied well back from the eye, shaggy possum fur dubbing and hot orange head creates a buoyant fly that has proven irresistible to trout for decades.
The author of Fran Betters’ Fly Fishing, Fly Tying and Pattern Guide (1986) also invented the Usual, another pattern designed to ride the tumbling waters of the AuSable but this time tied with fur from the feet of the snowshoe hare.
Fran was renowned for knowing his river intimately, drawing his own maps of the area and advising a constant stream of visitors to his shop on where, how and what fly to fish on the AuSable.
Fran Betters, seen here tying an AuSable Wulff at his bench, has been credited as one of the most inventive of flytiers, putting his deep knowledge of the AuSable River to good use.
Vince Marinaro
The development of the hackle-free fly owes much to Vince Marinaro’s thorax–style of dry fly tying in which the wing is set well back on the hook and the tail fibers are widely splayed. His flies do have hackles, but they are tied in such a way as to give the fish a clear view of the wing from below. Marinaro—another Fly Fishing Hall of Fame inductee—was also something of a pioneer in the use of photography to study rises and the fish’s view of the fly.
The tail played a vital role in Fran Betters’ Haystack, giving it both buoyancy and stability, and the tail performs the same duty in the fly that Doug Swisher and Carl Richards introduced in their ground-breaking book Selective Trout, published in 1971. The book was the product of their intensive study of what trout actually see as a fly floats into view above them, and what cues cause the fish to take a fly. Using specially adapted cameras and microscopes they observed natural flies and fish behavior in a range of rivers and in aquariums, and they concluded that the abdomen and the wing profile were far more important as triggers than the legs/hackle. This led them to develop several new fly patterns, the most important of which was the No-Hackle Dry Fly, tied on a 3XL fine wire hook with a split tail of dry fly hackle fibers, a dubbed fur body, and wings of duck primary wing quill or duck shoulder feather set low on the body so that the trailing edges rest on the surface of the water. Together with the tail, the wings give the fly stability and offer the fish a realistic silhouette of a newly emerged dun. It proved to be a deadly imitation, outfishing hackled dries in many situations, and the innovative work of Swisher and Richards brought hackle-free flies to the forefront. In 2011 the two men were inducted into the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame.
COMPARADUN
If there is a downside to the No-Hackle fly it is that the setting of the wings requires a good deal of skill, and that the wings themselves prove fragile when taken by a fish—which the No-Hackle fly will be. In 1975, Al Caucci and Bob Nastasi, in their book Hatches: A Complete Guide to Fishing the Hatches of North American Trout Streams, introduced a no-hackle style of fly that was, in many respects, a tidy and sparsely dressed descendant of Fran Betters’ Haystack. It was called the Comparadun, not because of any connection with the parachute-hackled Paradun but following the theme of their earlier, widely acclaimed book Comparahatch, published in 1973.
The Comparadun has an uplifted tail of hackle fibers or microfibetts, a thinly dubbed body and—the key to the pattern—a deer hair wing that forms a semicircular fan across the top half of the fly. This gives it the appropriate silhouette, as well as stability and buoyancy, and the fly sits flush on the surface, making it suitable for slow-moving water. The form of the wing almost guarantees that the fly will land the right way up on the water and will stay that way. Quick to construct and durable, the Comparadun can be tied in a range of colors and sizes to represent almost any adult mayfly, especially newly hatched or crippled duns.
A variation on the Comparadun, the Sparkle Dun, has a trailing polypropylene yarn shuck that turns this pattern into a highly effective emerger. There are also versions of both flies that use synthetic materials in place of deer hair for the wing.
For their contributions to fly-fishing, and for the five highly influential books that they co-authored, Bob Nastasi and Al Caucci were inducted into the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame in 2006.
Al Caucci still has confidence in the fly he created some 40 years ago, and here he holds up a 20in (50cm) brown trout that took a #18 Pale Morning Dun Comparadun on the Beaverhead in Montana.
NEW MATERIALS
The availability of a wide variety of new synthetic fly tying materials has led tiers such as John R. Gantner of California to revisit the No-Hackle Dry Fly of Swisher and Richards and remedy some of its shortcomings while retaining its excellent fish-fooling qualities.
The use of materials such as cellophane, closed-cell foam, synthetic dry fly dubbing and monofilament has made it possible to design no-hackles that are much easier to tie than the originals, are more durable and more buoyant (making them suitable for more turbulent water), can be tied on heavier and stronger hooks, and that almost invariably sit the right way up on the water. The materials can be selected or hand colored to match the natural insects.
Gantner exhorts anglers to return to the teachings of Swisher and Richards and to apply the modern materials, and he has created a range of “Nu-No Hackle” flies to prove his point.
