How to Tie the Little Yellow Sally Fly

Learn how to tie the Little Yellow Sally fly pattern, including step-by-step instructions, a video tutorial, pictures, and much more. Improve your fly-tying skills here.

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This fly shows up in Hatches and Fly Patterns of the Great Smokey Mountains by Don Kirk. I have no idea who first came up with this pattern. Yellow Sallys are the smallest of the stone flies and show up in rivers and streams all across the country. This is a dry fly version and reminds me of the Stimulator attractor fly. It floats well and is easy to see.

Recipe

• Hook: Daiichi 1270; 14
• Thread: Danville 6/0; Yellow
• Tag: Danville 4 Strand Floss; Red
• Body: Antron Bright Steelhead Dubbing; Bright Yellow
• Wing: Hareline Bleached Deer Hair
• Hackle: Whiting Dry Fly Cape; Ginger

Video Transcript

Hello, I'm Carl here at Trident Fly Fishing. Today's fly is the Little Yellow Sally. This fly is in the book Hatches and Fly Patterns of the Great Smoky Mountains by Don Kirk. I have no idea who first came up with this pattern. Yellow Sallies are the smallest of the stone flies and they show up in rivers and streams all across the country. This is a dry fly version. It reminds me a lot of a Stimulator attractor fly. It floats well and it's easy to see in the water.

Here's the fly in the vise. The hook we're using today is a Daiichi 1270, size 14. This is a small fly - it's typically tied in 14s and 16s. The thread we're going to use today is Danville's 70 denier in yellow. We'll get our thread started about two eye lengths behind the hook eye, then run this back to the gauge of the barb of the hook to give us a thread base. Cut off our excess, then back up to where we started.

The first material we're going to tie in is our tag. It's Danville's four strand rayon in red. Out of those four strands we're only going to use two of those strands. We're going to tie these in right on top of the hook and run this back to the gauge of the hook where we will form our tag. We'll take one of these strands - if I can get them untwisted here, there we go - and wrap back about five turns, then back up. Careful not to catch this on the hook point. It sure makes a mess if you do. Capture our floss, then take that last strand and bring it up over the top of the floss and tie that in. That's going to keep the floss from creeping down the hook. Cut off our excess. We'll run our thread back up to our initial tie-in point to neaten this up and cover some of that red.

Our body material for this fly is going to be some Antron Bright Steelhead Dubbing in bright yellow. We'll dub a thin noodle on here - just a tiny bit more, I think.

Next we'll tie in our wing. This is just some bleached deer hair. Don't need too big a clump - maybe a third of a pencil or less. Strip out all the fuzzy short hairs and put this in a stacker. We want this wing to be just a little bit longer than the back of the hook. We're going to cut off a lot of that material just to get it out of the way. We're also going to use the butts to help anchor this wing in. Use your thumb to spread them out across the top of the fly. Now we're just going to use our thread to form our thorax here. As you get to the base of the wing, if you take your turns lightly, you'll tend to lay the wing down, which is what we want.

The last material we're going to tie in is our hackle. Got one picked out here and sized to the hook. To prepare that, we'll cut off the material we don't need. Snip off several barb fibers from each side, leaving some stubs to help us tie it in. We're going to tie this in right at the base of the wing, then bring our thread forward to the eye. Now we're going to make open spiral turns - probably going to get about three turns on this down to our hook eye. When we reach the eye, we'll tie that off and snip off our excess. Form a small head, take our whip finish tool, and make a four or five turn whip finish. Cut our thread.

Last is head cement. This is Loon's Water Based - soaks in really well. If you get it in the eye, just a flick like so cleans the eye right out. And that completes our fly. Please feel free to add comments at the bottom of the page. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button to keep up to date on all the new content here at Trident Fly Fishing. Thanks for watching. Hope to see you again next time.