Tight Lined Tales of a Fly Fisherman: Mike Schmidt of ACF Breaks Down the Marabou Veiling Technique

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Mike Schmidt of ACF Breaks Down the Marabou Veiling Technique

One of the things that I like to demonstrate at fly shows are the tricks that make my life as a tier easier, and my flies more durable when faced with an angry fish. I always aim for my flies to have inherent movement, so one of my favorite materials is marabou. Unfortunately marabou, while full of movement, tends to be brittle. Of course I can not do anything about the feather fibers I can eliminate the part that is most likely to get broken and cause the fly to unravel...the stem. When utilizing marabou for veiling I do not use the standard technique of palmering the feather, but rather a technique more similar to spinning deerhair. The following is a step by step of how I create the marabou veiling on patterns like the Red Rocket and Red October.

STEP 1: With a full marabou plume in hand, come down the center stem until the feather fibers are the length that is acceptable to you.

STEP 2: At that point clip out just the center stem, leaving the rest of the feather intact, and remove the tip of the feather.

STEP 3: Stroke the feather together as a flattened bunch and lay it down on the top of the hook shank. Slide your index finger down the far side of the hook shank to help spread the feather down the far side of the shank.

STEP 4: Loosely wrap your thread up over the top of the shank and then as you come around use the thread tension to 'pull' the feather the rest of the way around the shank and back up the near side. This is very similar to what happens when loosely spinning deerhair.

STEP 5: Give yourself some secure wraps behund the head to hold everything in place.

STEP 6: Using your scissors, trim out the fibers hanging out over the eye. The closer you can get behind the eye the cleaner the end result will be.