How to Tie the Ginger Quill Dry Fly

Learn how to tie the Ginger Quill Dry Fly pattern, including step-by-step instructions, a video tutorial, pictures, and much more. Improve your fly-tying skills here.

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The Ginger Quill dry fly has been around for years and has been attributed to Alfred Ronalds of England in 1836. Traditionally a fly for warmer months and typically tied in sizes 12 -16. This recipe is from the book Flies for Trout by Stewart and Allen.

Material List

• Hook: TMC 100 in size 14
• Thread: Uni Thread 8/0 in Rusty Dun
• Wing: Spirit River Duck Quill Natural
• Tail: Whiting Dry Fly Cape Ginger
• Abdomen: Stripped Peacock Herl Natural
• Hackle: Whiting Dry Fly Cape Ginger

Video Transcript

Hello, I'm Carl at Trident Fly Fishing. Today we're going to tie the Ginger Quill dry fly. The Ginger Quill dry fly has been around for years and it's been attributed to Alfred Ronalds of England back in 1836. It's traditionally a fly for the warmer months and it's typically tied in sizes 12 through 16. The recipe for this fly came from the book Flies for Trout by Stewart and Allen.

Here's the fly in the vise. The hook we're putting in the vise today is the TMC 100BL - that's the barbless version of their standard dry fly hook. The thread we're going to be using today is UTC 8/0 in Rusty Dun. We'll get this tie started about an eye length and a half behind the hook eye and form a thread base for our wing.

The wings in this case are going to be goose quill. You can also use duck quill if you have that available. These are just natural colored gray and they're typically tied about a hook gap in width. I've made myself up some tools here from various hook sizes - just cut off the eye and stuck them in a piece of wood, but it gives me a little handle to hold on to and I can separate out some fairly accurate slips quickly. You need a left and a right wing so that you can get a pair.

Once you've got your slips separated from your quills, we're going to put those in shiny side to shiny side like so. We want these to be a hook shank in length, so we'll measure that out with a pinching wrap and wrap our thread back, cut off our excess, wrap our thread forward to the back of the wing, pull the wings back, jump our thread forward, and form a small thread dam to help stand the wings up. Then we just want to separate those wings, and if we make some gentle crossing wraps they'll separate nicely for us.

Next we're going to tie in our tail. That's going to be from a Whiting half cape in the color ginger. We'll select a feather from down at the base like this one that I've already pulled out, pull some of the barbules out 90 degrees to the stem to even out the tips, tear those off, measure these out to be a hook shank in length, and tie those in on top right above where the barb would have been. That looks pretty good. Cut off our excess here and heat that up a little bit so we get a bit of a gradual taper.

The body of this fly is going to be made from some stripped peacock herl. This material can dry out on you and be real prone to breaking sometimes - I've had to soak this in water before I've been able to use it. We'll tie these in right at the base of the tail and then wrap our thread forward to the wing. Get our trusty hackle pliers out - oh, it broke on me. These can be dry sometimes. You have to soak these quills in water to soften them up so that they won't do that. Try that again, and once we reach our wing we're going to tie that off and cut our excess.

Our hackle for this fly is going to come from that same cape, sized to the hook which is a 14. Cut off all of the bad stuff and snip off some barbules on either side of the stem to create a tie-in point. Tie this in behind our wing, bring our thread forward to the hook eye, and now we'll take some wraps behind the wing and then in front of the wing. Pull the wing back, reach the eye, tie that off, reposition that just a little, cut off our excess, pull this back, and form a small head.

Take our whip finish tool and do a four or five turn whip finish - there it is - and cut our thread. Now a little head cement. This is Loon's water-based. Get rid of that excess with a little flick and it'll clear the eye right out. And there we have our completed fly.

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