At the Vise: Grey Duster

If you’re restless, like I am, and you feel life’s too short to quit looking around trying to discover new things, or at to least see old ones in fresh ways, maybe it’s time you finally move beyond an Adams.

I know it’s all but heresy. Famed writers from Tom McGuane to John Gierach have sung the praises of the lowly Adams, almost everybody’s all-time favorite generic buggy dry fly. And let’s be frank about it: if you are a hard-core presentationist, angling under the belief that your fly is the last thing that matters, you could fish the entire season out of an Adams box, with flies from sizes 10 to 22, and do just as well as anyone else during all the mayfly hatches you encounter — and probably some other hatches, as well. If you tied nothing but Adamses, I have to believe that you’d know how to tie an awfully mean and clean one, hackle-tip wings and all. And if you owned only a couple of hackle capes, which is part of the appeal of the pattern, you might as well splurge for the deluxe primo platinum grade, or whatever they call the ones that sell for eye-popping prices. In case you haven’t yet learned the lesson, good materials really can help produce good flies. Yes, it’s easy to go overboard, but it’s safe to say that in fly tying, as in all serious crafts, good tools and good materials make the job go more smoothly, the results far better than trying to get by with dime-store junk.

Still, the last thing required of a timeless all-around pattern would be any suggestion of the need for new or improved materials. The Grey Duster should make that perfectly clear. In its purest form, which goes back at least a hundred years to Welsh anglers on the upper reaches of the River Dee (hence the Brit spelling — it’s “gray” in Americanese), the Grey Duster requires but two components: fur from a hare’s mask and a feather from a mediocre badger hackle. Oddly enough, I notice lots of tyers who haven’t yet acquired some sort of badger hackle, either a hen’s neck or a cape or inexpensive saddle. So I take back what I just said about new materials: if you take nothing else from this column because you would rather imitate the precise, anatomically correct features of the genus and species of specific mayflies, at least find yourself some badger hackle, if you don’t already own some.

Precision, here, is not the key. The Duster, in fact, can bring into question how accurate any pattern need be. Author Courtney Williams considered the Grey Duster as good as, if not better than any other mayfly imitation described in A Dictionary of Trout Flies, his classic work, first published in 1949. In Trout and Salmon Flies of Scotland, Stan Headley claims that some anglers fish nothing but Dusters over any sort of mayflies, and if Dusters fail, they leave the water. Tiny Dusters have long been used to fish the British Caenis hatch, also known as the Angler’s Curse, a tiny mayfly that looks a lot like our own Tricos, though experts are quick to inform you the two are not the same. The whole point of the Grey Duster, of course, is that you couldn’t care less about the name of the mayfly on which you find trout feeding. You just want a fly that’s about the right size and about the right color.

You’ll take it from there.

That’s your Grey Duster. Like most old all-around patterns, it gets tweaked more ways than spaghetti sauce, which I think is the smartest thing you can do for your own bugs and the waters you fish. One common change is to add a wing. Scotsman Davie McPhail ties parachute Dusters with wing posts fashioned out of either deer hair or CDC. Many tyers also add a tail to their Dusters, a move that follows a conventional line of thinking in dry-fly design, but one you may want to think twice about.

Writer and artist Bob Wyatt, a Canadian now living in Scotland, argues that the traditional tailless Duster is actually not a dun or adult mayfly at all, but an emerger. He believes that the efficacy of the pattern has to do with how the tailless fly rides low in the water and that the visible hook, hanging beneath the surface, may in fact enhance an imitation of a vulnerable emerging mayfly suspended in the film. In my own experience, I’ve no doubt that I fool far more snooty trout with flies that sit in the water than with those that sit on top of it, even a fly that vanishes into the film, so that all I can do is guess where it is in relation to my leader until a fish reveals itself in such a way that suggests I should lift — carefully — and see what’s going on out there.

With the tailless Duster, then, we return to the trope of attitude — that is, the position or posture of your fly in the water. Attitude is a presentationist’s concept. The idea is that even the best imitation will fail if the fly isn’t presented in the way the bait you’re trying to imitate behaves when fish are feeding on it.

There’s a reason you swing certain wet flies, but you fish certain nymphs with a drag-free drift, even if they are three feet below the surface.


If you think about attitude, you are well on your way to finding a balance between notions of imitation and presentation. Sure, you want a fly that looks right, but does the design include elements that will help the fly do what it’s supposed to do once it reaches the water? Which way does the head point — upstream or down? Or for that matter, should the head point toward the surface or toward the bottom of the stream? Does the bait swim tail first? Does it roll over and swim upside down? Does a mayfly emerge with its abdomen sticking up out of the water? How does an egg-laying caddis swim? These may seem trite or even facetious speculations, but the more I’ve come to understand what makes some anglers exceptional — and the rest of us fairly mediocre — the more I recognize how often they animate their casts so that their flies present and maintain the correct attitude. This is subtle. Still, we all know the difference between “getting a couple” and actually hammering fish, especially while trout are up and feeding.

But a tailless, wingless fly? You can see why the Duster might be a hard sell to anglers looking for the latest and greatest patterns tied with space-age materials engineered to prick the subliminal longings of unsuspecting fish — or at least the desires of those of us who cast for them. Trout, however, seem yet to have read the ad copy. Like the soft-hackled wet fly, the Duster, as with similar sparsely dressed old-school or Clyde-style dry flies, has been fooling fish since the dark ages of the sport. And I suspect Dusters, just like those rediscovered soft hackles, will be fooling trout long after anyone reading this is still around and kicking.

One aspect of the modern Duster does seem worth noting, however. Now that anglers view this fly as an emerger pattern, rather than an on-top-of-the-surface dun, many of them have taken to tying it on curved, emerger-style hooks. Because I believe so strongly in the importance of a fly’s attitude in the water, I’m a fan of many of the technical innovations available in today’s fly hooks. By all means, if you have access to them, tie up some Dusters on the TMC 2487 or 206 or 226, the Daiichi 1130 or 1150, the Dai-Riki 125, the Kamasan B-100, or maybe even the Fulling Mill Czech Nymph Hook. I like the looks of all of these hooks. But as you can see in the accompanying photos, I tied my recent Dusters on regular old standard dry-fly hooks, and I don’t think that will handicap me in the least. Tailless, the butt or aft end of the fly is going to penetrate the surface, and the canted fly will ride on the length of the hackle fibers, not just the tips. Of course, I don’t expect to be able to see the fly after a drift or two. It will hang, instead, in the film, that vulnerable attitude that trout just seem to love.

Many variations of Dusters are now tied not only with different hooks and with wings and tails, but with clipped or doubled hackles. Yet even Davie McPhail, who thinks his parachute-style Grey Duster is an improved variant, is said, at times, to bite off the tails of his new and improved Duster so that the fly sits “well-down in the water.”

Like an Adams on top, a Duster well down is a fly the trout I cast to will generally buy.

Materials

Hook: Standard dry fly hook, size 12 to 24, or curved emerger-style hook

Thread: Black or brown

Body: Grayish fur from a natural hare’s mask, or similar

Hackle: Badger with a well-pronounced dark center

Tying Instructions

Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise. By all means, experiment with curved emerger-style hooks. Start the thread directly behind the eye of the hook and cover the entire shank with an even layer of wraps.

STEP 1
STEP 1

Step 2: With the thread at the aft end of the hook shank, wax the top couple of inches and twist dubbing onto the thread, creating a slender noodle. McPhail likes mole mixed with rabbit; I like any blend off of a hare’s mask because of the mix of colors and textures, which to my eyes always looks more natural than dubbing dyed a single color. Wind the dubbing noodle forward, creating the classic carrot-shaped body. Carry the body forward slightly more than if you were going to include a wing, as well as hackle. At the same time, leave yourself enough space for both the hackle and eventual head and whip finish.

STEP 2
STEP 2

Step 3: For the hackle, select a feather from a badger cape with plenty of dark fibers toward the lower portion of the center of the feather.

STEP 3
STEP 3

If you get sold on Dusters, as I think you will, especially in small sizes (18 to 24) for late-season Blue-Winged Olives or the like, you’ll never pass up a badger cape without inspecting it as a possible source for future Dusters. The right feather does what the pair of two feathers, grizzly and brown, try to do on an Adams. If you’ve never seen one used, the first time that you wind it around the hook, the single two-tone badger feather, dark in the middle and pale as wings at the tips, will startle you.

Strip the webbiest material from the bottom of the stem and secure the stem, just ahead of the dubbing, with the underside of the feather facing you. Grab the tip of the hackle with your hackle pliers. As you wind the hackle, don’t be worried about winding directly on top of other wraps — you’ll see that the fibers splayed around the dark center create just the effect you’re after. After four to six turns of hackle, catch the stem with your thread, trim away the excess hackle, form a tidy head, and whip finish. Saturate the final thread wraps with lacquer or your favorite head cement.