[Red Owl]

I have never before tied sulpher spinners and I'm sort of experimenting to find what I like.
I have used hackle points for the tail, tied split, dry fly dubbing on the body, and floating poly yarn for the wings. About a 1/2" of the yarn for a #18 hook. I tie this upright and then divide the wings and bring them down to a spinner level. I tested out the fly in a cup of water without any dressing- which I thought maybe I didn't need with the floating yarn. Well it floats for a while but if I squeeze it and push it down underwater, it stays under water. Is this normal? In other words even with floating poly for the wings do you still need to false cast to dry out the fly and/or apply floatant? Thanks for any help.
I also tried some deer hair for the wings, floats ok but the hairs are sort of stiff and I was worried the hairs may interfere with hooking the fish.

[dshort]

I've always needed to use floatant with poly yarn. It eventually gets waterlogged and sinks. I use it on my parachute wings and it'll float all day long if you treat it with floatant.

Can we see a picture of this sulfur spinner? I tied a few recently with crystal flash as the wing material and really liked the effect but I don't know how it will fish. They might sink like a stone.

[Red Owl]

Well let me refresh my skills in how to post pictures, a little challenged in that department. It is, I believe a pretty standard tie, I first put on the wings, some folks put the poly horizontally cross wise but I stood it up, like a hair wing on a Wulff and I then divided and brought it down into a spent position on a #14 hook. The first wing I tied was a little sparse so the subsequent ones had a double on the poly yarn. I loop around the base of each wing to draw it in, which gives a better splayed out appearance to the wing. I use white because the spinners aren't supposed to be dun colored- or so I've been told.
For the tail I tried white deer hair but settled on very light dun hackle fibers. I have a lot of trouble getting a split on the tail. I put the little ball of dubbing in the area but I must be doing the wrong kind of figure eight because if I pull too tight one of the splits gets out of line.
I use cream dry fly Anton dubbing, I wrap this pretty tight against the wing to lock the wing and then whip finish the head- I use fingers.
I ended up putting floatant on it, floated fine for a half hour so I guess I'm good to go.
Now to learn how to cast (just kidding).

[dshort]

I used to have a lot of trouble with split tails also. It got much easier when I discovered microfibbets (I love those things). Now I tie almost everything with split tails. You can use a small bump of dubbing or just build up a few turns of thread. I tie in the microfibbets about halfway up the hook and wrap backwards toward the bend. I cinch the first wrap down tight, which sort of splays out the tails and then I divide them in 2. You can use your off hand to keep them in place as you wrap back, making sure they are off to each side of the hook. Then just cinch them up against the dubbing or thread bump you made. No figure eights needed. Once you get the hang of it, it's really not too bad.

Also, for what it's worth, I once read that dun colored wings on spinners become more indistinct and, therefore, more realistic once they are wet than white ones. Real spinner wings are almost invisible on the water. I think this comment pertained to feather wings so I'm not sure if the same thing would apply to the poly yarn.

[peregrines]

Red Owl-

For easy split tails on comparaduns and spinners etc., try this neat way that Al and Gretchen Beatty came up with:

Tie in as you normally would but leave a 6" tag of thread

Snip it off and set aside.

Tie in your tailing stuff (Fibetts, hackle etc) as you normally would.

Grab the excess 6" piece of thread and loop over the shank of the hook, with the loop on the bottom.

Slide the loop down towards the bend and come up thru the middle of the tail material and pull back towards the hook eye to split the tails. Wahlah!

When you've got them where you want them, bind down the loop and snip excess thread.

No need for a dubbing bump.

For sulpher spinners I mostly figure 8 (not posted) a very sparse amount of poly since it's fast and you can use a long length for ease of tying and trim to size. If I want to get real fussy I'll hackle it with an oversize cream hackle (one size up from hook size) and cut top and bottom. Both require floatant. For small ones you can also just use CDC, but don't use floatant with CDC.

hope this helps.

peregrines

[Red Owl]

Thanks