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Dear Customers, After spending 60 years on the water and 25 years full time guiding, I am fully convinced nothing will out fish a dyed grizzly hackle. Back in the late 1930's and 40s a plain black or brown chenille body wrapped palmer fashion with a grizzly hackle was about as deadly as you could get. I fished them in all sizes from size 2-14 in 6x long down to 2x long hooks. They were just a plain wooly worm. We had no weighted lines so we would put about 6 or 8 strings of wrap around lead on our leaders and bump the bottom on those big deep runs in Northern New Mexico's Rio Grande River. It took years for someone to put a tail on them and call them wooly buggers. We used to get our grizzly hackle by the bulk from Herter's and I've sold many dozens of these flies for $1.50 a dozen. Good money in the late 1930's. We caught big fish in those days and bigger fish in these days. Sorry about that, I sort of get carried away, but at age 73 I'm entitled. Let's get back to grizzly hackle. I never dream we would have these beautiful hybrid birds we have now. I have a saddle in my office dyed Burnt Orange. During my morning coffee, I picked it up and looked at it in awe. After dying thousands of these capes and saddles and fishing them many thousands of hours, I know why they are so effective. As I said before, they are a three color feather and when mixed with the right body material you have a four color fly all blended into one. Add a wisp of Burnt Orange or Rust Marabou tail, fish it very, very slowly and big fish have a hard time resisting it. These colors work as well in rivers as they do on a lake. Jay Fair (this is a segment of a introduction for a catalog, written by Jay Fair in 1997)
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Copyright © Jay Fair's Eagle Fly Fishing 2008
a Sierra Stream and Mountain Company
