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Over the last few years some of the best fishing I have had has been polaroiding to wild brown trout in the relatively clear waters of Lake Jindabyne. I find my self spending more and more time engaged in this "hunting" like pursuit. The more time I have spent watching the behavior of fish when they see a fly the more I lean toward presenting smaller more delicate flies fished either static or very slow in order to entice a strike. I notice more often than not that when confronted with a small static fly that browns in particular either take the fly or if they don't take the fly, they are not spooked as often as they would be with a bigger fly, and often will respond to the same or another small fly presented to them a few minutes later. The same can't be said when fishing larger flies. The fish either take the fly or more often than not take fright and spook off into the depths. For polaroiding treat them and the leader so that they sink and allow them to sink naturally through the water column in sight of the fish. Only retrieve enough line to keep in contact with the fly.

I have extended my belief in small flies to my loch style fishing where they are good as an attractor or top dropper in a team of loch style flies. Fish them up through the water column at various speeds or slosh them around just below the surface when fish are taking emergers.

They work well in rivers also particularly in the faster bubbly water where fish respond to them well  when fishing across and down and particularly on the swing at the end of the drift.

Soft hackle flies are  more of a class of flies rather than just a fly. The key elements of the tie are a ribbed nymph body that has been fuzzeled and then just a few soft hackle fibres to create movement that have been tied in with a dubbing loop .

There is almost no limit to the combinations that you can come up with and these are the ones that I regularly fish and you may like to try. I don't know if fish pick them up as emerging insects but they do fish well when fish have emergers on the menu.

I tie unweighted versions on curved caddis hooks and bead head versions on curved nymph hooks and a selection of my favourites are shown below.

Materials

Process

A	Wind the thread in touching turns to the bend of the hook. I like to use Knapek Lure hooks, Hanak Grub hooks or Tiemco 3769 hooks for this fly but any open gape dry fly or nymph hook will do. If the hook is made with fine wire you should add 2 or 3 wraps of fine lead wire to the front half of the hook shank. Understanding hooks Tie in a short tail if required but I prefer not to. Tie in the ribbing material.

B	Dub a cigar shaped body on the rear 4/5 of the hook shank. You can make this up of a single color or more than one color seals fuf Single strand dubbing

C	The picture above shows a strip of male Velcro. Brush the fly with the Velcro so as to lift out the tips of dubbing material.

D	Tie in a suitable soft hackle by the tip or create a hackle by trapping hackle fibres in a dubbing loop. Wet fly hackle

E	Wind on the 'hackle' just once or twice in front of the body. Trim the butt end of the hackle off with a blade.

F	Pull the hackle backward with you finger tips and take a few wraps of thread over the leading edge of the hack so that it faces back.

G	Build up a neat head. neat thread heads Whip finish and varnish the head..

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