What it is
Lee Wulff's hair-wing version of the Royal Coachman, tied for fast water where a delicate quill-wing dry would drown. It is the searching dry of the fly-fishing world: the fly you knot on when the water is quick and clear, nothing is hatching that you can name, and you want to cover the pockets and the bends with something you can follow. NSW DPIRD's Snowy Mountains guide puts it in a starter dry-fly selection for stream trout, and that is its standing everywhere trout live in Australia, from the New England tablelands to Tasmania's Western Lakes and the Victorian alps.
Anatomy
From the bend forward: a tail of stiff moose body hair or elk, the length of the shank, which props the rear of the fly on the water. A body in three parts, the Royal signature: a band of peacock herl, a band of red floss or silk, another band of peacock herl. Two upright, divided wings of white calf tail or calf body hair, set a third of the way back from the eye. A dense collar of brown hackle wound behind and in front of the wings, its barbs a little longer than the hook gap. A small thread head.
Key features
- Visibility. The white wings are for the angler, not the fish. In the glare off a high-country riffle they are the difference between seeing a take and setting on a memory.
- Float. Stiff tail, dense hackle and hair wings hold it high through broken water, where a parachute dry sits too low to be seen.
- The red band. Nobody agrees what it imitates. Fish take it anyway, which is the point of an attractor: a buggy silhouette with a spot of colour that a trout in fast water cannot afford to inspect.
- A dropper carrier. It floats well enough to suspend a small bead-head nymph, which makes it the natural top fly of a creek dry-dropper.
Typical materials
| Part | Typical material |
|---|---|
| Hook | Standard dry-fly hook, size 12 to 16 |
| Thread | 8/0 or 70 denier, black |
| Tail | Moose body hair or elk hair, stiff and even |
| Body | Peacock herl, red floss, peacock herl, in three equal bands |
| Wings | White calf tail or calf body hair, upright and divided |
| Hackle | Brown or coachman brown rooster, two turns behind the wings and three in front |
| Head | Thread, small |
Fishing it
Fish it upstream, short, and on a leader long enough that the fly line never lands in the lane. Drop it at the head of a pocket or on the seam of a bend and let it come back to you without drag. On a creek too thin for an indicator, hang a small Pheasant Tail a foot under it and fish the dry-dropper: you have covered the fish that are looking up and the ones that are not.
When the fish rise to it and turn away, drop to a 16 or change to an Adams. A refusal on a Wulff usually means the fish saw the fly perfectly well and wanted something smaller and quieter, not that it did not see it at all.
