What it is
The Humpy is a western American creek fly, built to survive plunge pools and come up still floating, and the Royal Humpy is the version with white wings and a red underbody in the Royal Coachman tradition. It is a creek fly first: quick, cold, clear water with boulders and pockets, which describes the alpine creeks of Kosciuszko, where NSW DPIRD's guide names it in size 12 to 14 as the creeks warm through the season, and equally the small streams of the Victorian high country, the New England tablelands and Tasmania's upland rivers.
Anatomy
From the bend forward: a tail of moose or elk hair. A bundle of deer hair tied in by the butts at the bend, laid back along the shank and later pulled forward to form the hump. An underbody of red floss, thread or dubbing over the rear two-thirds of the shank, showing through under the hump. The deer hair pulled forward over the underbody and tied down behind the wing position, the tips left standing to form the wings (white calf hair on the Royal version, tied in separately). A dense collar of hackle, grizzly and brown mixed, in front of the hump. A thread head.
Key features
- The hump. A shell of hollow deer hair over the body is what makes the fly unsinkable. It traps air and sheds water, and the fly comes up floating after a fish, a plunge or a bad cast.
- The underbody colour. Red on the Royal, yellow or green on the others: the flash of colour a fish sees under the hair, the same idea as the Wulff's red band.
- Visibility. White wings above a dark hump in a dark pocket.
- Toughness. A well-tied Humpy takes more fish than any other dry in the box before it needs replacing.
Typical materials
| Part | Typical material |
|---|---|
| Hook | Standard dry-fly hook, size 12 to 16 |
| Thread | 6/0 or 140 denier, red or black |
| Tail | Moose body hair or elk, stiff |
| Hump and wing base | Deer body hair, fine and hollow |
| Underbody | Red floss or thread on the Royal; yellow or green on the plain Humpy |
| Wings | White calf tail or calf body hair, upright and divided |
| Hackle | Grizzly and brown rooster, mixed, wound dense |
| Head | Thread |
Fishing it
It is a cousin of the Royal Wulff with more float and less delicacy, and you fish it the same way but in rougher water. Drop it into the white water at the head of a pocket and let the current carry it into the seam. One drift. Then the next pocket. A trout in pocket water decides in a second and does not get a second look.
Its buoyancy makes it a fine dry-dropper top fly in water where a Stimulator is a size too big. Hang a tungsten Hare's Ear a couple of feet below it in the deeper slots. When the creek drops and clears in late summer and the fish start refusing it, that is the water's way of asking for a hopper or a smaller, quieter dry.
