How To Tie a Green Drake Dry Fly

Learn how to tie a Green Drake Dry Fly pattern, including a video tutorial and a full material list. Improve your fly-tying skills and know-how here!

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The Green Drake is one of the largest of the mayflies. It is an exceptional dry fly to tie on during the early summer months when mayflies of all kinds begin to hatch in abundance. Tie it in sizes 8-12 for maximum effectiveness!

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Material List:

Hook: TMC 100 (size 10)

Thread: UTC Ultra Thread (70 D in Olive) and UNI-Flexx (Camel)

Tail: Moose Body Hair

Wing: Coastal Deer Hair (Bleached)

Body: Hareline Super Fine Dry Fly Dubbing (Olive)

Video Transcript

Hello, I'm Carl at Trident Fly Fishing. Today we're going to tie the Green Drake. This is one of the largest of the mayflies, and it's suggested that we tie it in sizes 8 through 12. Here's our vise. We'll get the tie started.

The hook we're going to be using today is a TMC 100. That's their standard dry fly hook, and this is a size 10. Our thread is going to be UTC 70 denier in olive. Get a little wax on the thread to help us with our deer hair. We'll get this thread started about an eye length and a half to two eye lengths behind the eye. Wrap back a ways to form a base for our deer hair wing.

For the wing, we're using some Hareline coastal deer hair medium. We'll cut a small clump out here, get out all the fuzzy junk, and get it in a stacker. We want our wing to be about a hook shank in length, so we'll measure that out and tie that in. Pinch wrap and start wrapping back. We'll cut this material off at a little bit of an angle to help form a taper. Wrap through it. We'll get rid of some stray hairs here so they don't show through the body when we get that far along.

We'll jump our thread in front of the wing and form a dam to help hold that up. I like to push my finger into the deer hair - it forms a fan and makes it easier for me to separate it out into two fairly even wings. Once we've got that, we're just going to make some crossing wraps to separate them, and then we'll make a few posting turns around each wing to keep the hairs together. Now we'll coax that material forward and keep it out of our way.

Wrap back to the start of the bend of the hook where we're going to tie our tail material in. Our tail material is going to be some Hareline moose body hair. We'll take about a half a dozen strands of that and put them in our stacker. We want this to be about a hook shank in length - it's a mayfly, they have long tails. We're going to wrap these up to the start of where the deer hair ends and trim off the excess. Neaten this up a little bit to start to form a tapered body.

Next we're going to tie in our rib material. That's some UNI-Flexx in the color camel. It's kind of an elastic material - it's going to protect our dubbing and also provide us with some segmentation. You can see it's kind of stretchy. We're going to tie this in on the far side of the hook. As we wrap it over the body, we're going to wrap in the opposite direction that we put the dubbing on. That will help this material lay on top of the dubbing instead of sinking down in it.

For our body, we're going to use some Super Fine dubbing in the color olive. Form a nice thin noodle here. Now the rib material - we're going to wrap that in the opposite direction. Probably about five turns will get us there. Cut off our excess.

For our hackle, we're going to use some Whiting olive grizzly. I've got some that are sized out to a size 10 hook and we'll prep those. Jump our thread up in front of our wing and wrap forward to the eye. Take our hackle pliers and make about three wraps behind the wing. Pull the wing back and make a like number of turns in front. Capture our material, cut off our excess, and form a small head.

Get our handy whip finish tool out. Four or five turn whip finish. Seat the knot. Cut our thread. Spruce up our wing. And a little head cement - this is Loon's Water Based. It soaks into the knot really well and it's easy to clean out of the eye. Just a flick and the eye's clean. Our fly is finished.