Punk Rocker

Over the weekend I found a few minutes to try something I've wanted to try for years....stacking deer hair. I've seen flies with stacked deer hair before and always loved the way they looked, but I've never tried it. I tried spinning deer hair once before, and didn't do too well and never tried it again. Recently I've been following the work of Pat Cohen on http://gotbronze.blogspot.com and been extremely impressed. He ties a pattern called a Punk Rocker which combines two of my favorite things....deer hair and mohawks. I've tied a fly or two in the past with mohawk, but never did they turn out even half as cool as his flies. So, last night with a little bit of time (trying to avoid the Miss America Pageant that my wife and mother were watching in the other room) I sat down and tried to tie up a punk rocker...or at least my version of one.

I learned a few things from doing this. No matter how many ties I thought I was almost done, I wasn't. Once I used the hair packer and pushed the hair back I found plenty of bare hook ready and waiting to be covered. I need to use a bit more hair each time. Pat has a video about another one of his deer hair flies, and shows that he uses about 3 pencil sized clumps for top and bottom of each section. I'm pretty sure that's why it seemed like I needed more and more. I also learned that shaving this thing down to size/shape is pretty hard to do. I am now even more amazed how well Pat's look. Shaping is something I definitely need to work on.

Here's a picture of what I was trying to do:

If you are interested in trying these type of flies, I suggest checking out his video he posted a few weeks ago, it has a lot of good info on how to stack hair. I just watched a few minutes of it and picked up a few hints I wish I had remembered while tying the fly above.

Here's a link to the video. It's 30+ minutes, so grab something to drink and sit back and enjoy!

http://gotbronze.blogspot.com/2011/01/1-3-11-hot-butt-toad-tutorial.html


Keep up with his work on his blog at http://gotbronze.blogspot.com