How to Tie the Sparkle Dun: Essential Emerger Pattern for Selective Trout

What's up everybody, it's Ryan again at Trident Fly Fishing. I'm going to be tying the Ever Efficient Sparkle Dumb, which is a dry fly pattern designed to mimic a whole handful of different kinds of emergers. I'm going to be tying on a size 14 dry fly hook today, and we're going to use deer hair for the wing, along with a little bit of sparkle yarn in light tan for the tail and a little shuck around the wing. And then the body, we're going to use some UV fine dry light olive color dubbing. So I'm going to start by tying in behind the hook eye with some 6-0 Vivis thread in sand color, tan color. All of our materials, as usual, are available on TridentFlyFishing.com. I'm going to do some touching wraps back from the hook eye to the bend of the hook. This is a slightly longer shank dry fly hook. I'm going to go back a little farther, that looks good. And then I'm going to go back about two-thirds of the way to the hook eye. That's about halfway, a couple more wraps. Looks good right about there. That's where I'm going to tie in the wing. And again, for the wing, I'm going to use hairline deer body. This is natural, it's not been dyed. And I'm just going to choose a small clump like so. Cut it off about halfway to the hide. You absolutely can use a deer hair stacker at this point. I'm just going to kind of eyeball it. I want the tips to be facing forward. You'll notice there's a few stray ones here that I'm just going to pluck out of the way. No problem. I want this wing, again, this is a longer shanked hook, I want that wing to be about the length of that hook shank. And then I can advance the tie-in point right above my thread. This is the trickiest part of the fly, I'm going to do that one more time, there we go. And that, it's easy to, with really firm thread wraps, to pull that material over on the side, the far side of the hook shank. So I want to be really careful to use these fingers, my pointer finger and my thumb, to maintain control of those materials as I do a few, like, looser thread wraps here. I'm going to try that again, there we go. And now that it's in place, I want to really cinch down with these wraps so that it doesn't wrap around the hook shank. Wrap back a little bit, cut that off at an angle, like so. Just for the sake of really locking in that wing material, I am going to create a little bit of a taper. There's a bit of a cliff here between the tie-in point of the wing and the rest of the hook shank. So I'm going to just create this nice little natural taper, just using the thread, so that there's a gradual increase in thickness as I move from that hook point back towards the eye. I'm just going to smooth that out, I'm not going to get too worried about it in the sense that we're going to have dubbing. But if you use minimal dubbing like I do, it will take on the shape of the body underneath, so I'm just going to create that taper now. Make life easier later. Great, bring it back. Now I'm going to take some of the Sparkle Emerger in, this is a light tan, it almost looks white. And I just want, you can see they have these, it comes in these sort of natural shanks. I just want one of those, probably a thinner one like this one, that's about the width of the wing itself. And do a cut, a straight cut there. I'm actually going to use this as part of the wing material to create, imitate a shuck. And the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to lay this, using my offhand, so that it is the same length or a little bit shorter than the wing, and I'm going to tie that in right behind the tie-in point for the wing, trying to really capture that with my left hand pointer finger and thumb, like so. Lock that down. And now I'm just going to simply tie thread wraps back towards the bend of the hook. I'm pulling a little bit with my left pointer finger and thumb on this tail material. I'm going to go back past the hook point, right about there. And then I can kind of eyeball, I want that tail to be about a half inch long, perfect. And now my job is to use dubbing to create this covering of the, some people will tie this probably just with the thread itself. I like the look of the dubbing, it gives a little more body, a little more color. Now I need to wrap back towards the hook eye, and I'm going to be adding some dubbing today to create that body. And today we're going to use some dry light olive, it's extra fine dubbing, one of the biggest mistakes beginning tires make is they use too much dubbing. So I just want enough to kind of cover my thread. Oops, I got a little deer hair in there, that happens. You can use dubbing wax if you want. I'm going to spin this in one direction, so it's a nice, tight little dubbing noodle like so. Tie that in. My preference is just to hold onto this, you don't have to do that, but it kind of keeps it out of the way of the thread wraps. And I'm going to wrap forward, adding a little bit more dubbing as I go. You can see it kind of maintains that nice taper, going right behind that shuck. Now what I'm going to do, and this is the tricky part, I didn't leave myself a ton of room behind the hook eye, a little bit, that looks pretty good actually, I'm actually going to add more dubbing to my thread because I'm going to pull this wing material up so the post is sticking almost straight up and down. And what I want to do is make sure I have dubbing on my thread for when I wrap beneath that tie-in point. And then I'm going to add a little bit of dubbing in front of the wing once it's pushed up as a post. So I'm going to make a nice, close wrap behind the wing material and then with my fingers I'm going to really sweep that back, trying to capture as many of those fibers as I can. And here's the tricky part, as I'm wrapping, I'm actually putting a little pressure and wrapping back into the post material, like so. That way it sticks straight up and down. Looks pretty darn good. And now I can whip finish. You could also do a half hitch here if you prefer. Sometimes a half hitch with just a little bit of head cement on the thread is the way to go. Make sure that's cinched down. Put that on slack. Now with this, with the yarn, I'm just going to kind of separate it out like so with my fingers to make it kind of interspersed with the deer hair. And that will give it this nice shiny effect of the shuck. And I think that catches light. I think the trout see that and like that. And that, my friends, is the Sparkle Done.