How to Tie the Royal Wulff Attractor Fly

Learn how to tie the Royal Wulff Attractor 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 was designed by the legendary Lee Wulff as an attractor dry fly in the early 1930's. It's extremely effective, floats very well and is a great fly for fast water. A few of these in various sizes are always in my dry fly box.

Recipe

• Hook: TMC 100; size 12
• Thread: Veevus GSP 50D; Black
• Wing: Hareline Calf Body Hair; White
• Tail: Hairline Bucktail; Natural or Brown
• Body: Peacock Herl
• Danville 4 Strand Floss; Red
• Hackle: Whiting Dry Cape; Furnace or Brown

Video Transcript

Today we're going to tie the Royal Wulff. This fly was designed by the legendary Lee Wulff as an attractor dry fly in the 1930s. It's extremely effective, floats well, and fishes great in fast water. Here's the completed fly in the vise.

The hook we have in the vise today is a TMC 100BL. That's the barbless version of their 100 dry hook, on a size 12. This fly is typically tied in a 10 through a 16 - at least that's what Lee Wulff recommended. Today's thread is going to be some Veevus GSP in 50D in the color black. We'll get this thread started about two eye lengths behind the hook eye, tie back to about midpoint - this is going to be the base for our wing - and back forward.

The first material we're going to tie in is going to be some white calf body hair. When Lee first designed this fly, he designed it with deer hair, but in his book he says that as things progressed, he found that the calf tail hair was much easier to work with and just as buoyant. Cut a small clump, strip out all the fuzzies and short hair. You can use calf tail hair instead of body hair if you wish - it works just as well, but it's a heck of a lot harder to stack. We want that to be a hook shank in length, and we're going to add just a drop of Zap-A-Gap or super glue to the top of those threads just to help hold it in place. Make a pinch wrap, and then tight wraps back to the midpoint of the hook. Once we get there, we're going to cut this off at an angle. I sometimes struggle with that, so today we're going to do it in stages - makes it a little easier to tie everything in place.

Run our thread back to the bend of the hook, to where the barb would have been, right about there. The next material we're going to tie in is going to be some bucktail. The original material that Lee used - he said he used natural colored bucktail, and the only place I know to get that is from a white bucktail, taking the natural hairs from the back. We're going to measure this out against the shank of the hook, about there. Tie that in on top, check the length - just a tad long, better. Wrap back up to the base of our wing where we ended our tie, cut off our excess material.

We're going to stand our wing up, so we'll run our thread all the way to the back of the wing, grab our calf body hair, and we're going to make a thread dam right in front of that hair. We're going to separate the hair into two equal clumps. Using figure-eight turns and some cross wraps, we're going to separate those two wings. Then we're going to make some posting turns around those wings to further separate them - half a dozen turns should do it. As you pull back on your thread, you can see that it will move the wing back, which is what we want. As it pulls it back, we'll take a turn around the body and it keeps the wing straight out. Do the same thing to the other wing. I'm going to neaten that up just a little bit with our scissors. We can pinch the wings together and they should stand up nicely for us.

We're going to wrap our thread back to the base of the tail, where we're going to tie in some peacock herl. I like to form a rope with mine - I think it adds a little bit of strength to the herl, it's really delicate stuff. Pinch off the fragile tips, tie them in, and then we'll twist the strands up to form kind of a rope. Don't twist too hard or you'll break your herl. We're going to make three or four turns right here at the base of the tail. Tie that off, cut off our excess.

The next material we're going to tie in is going to be our red floss. I have Danville's four-strand rayon floss here, and from that we're only going to use one strand. We're going to wrap that back to the herl, tie that off. Then herl again - we'll do it just like we did the last one. Pull three strands off from the eye, break off the delicate ends, tie in the herl, give it a light twist, capture our herl, cut off the excess.

Our next material is going to be our hackle. For this we're going to use a Whiting cape in the color brown, sized to the hook, which is a 12. We'll prepare the feathers by snipping off a few barbules from either side, leaving some stubs there for our thread to purchase. We're going to tie these in together with the shiny side facing out, but we'll wrap them one at a time. Run our thread up to the eye. Using our hackle pliers, probably at least three turns back and the same number in front. Pull your wing back, bring your hackle feather up as close as you can to the wing, and tie that off. For the second hackle feather, we'll work that in between the first one. Reach the eye, capture it, tie it off, cut off our excess material, and form a small head.

Take our whip finish tool, four or five turn whip finish, and a little head cement - this is Loon's water-based, penetrates really well. And there's our completed fly.

I'd just like to encourage everyone to patronize the store. All of the materials that were used here today are available for purchase at Trident Fly Fishing. Please feel free to leave comments below, and don't forget to hit that subscribe button to view all the new content here at Trident Fly Fishing. Thanks for watching - hope to see you again next time.