Forth Wayne Bucktail
Our second book, Reading Waters will be off to the printers next week. Expect it out by the third week in May. Watch this blog for updates along the way. In the meantime, I’m cranking away on books three and four. Our third volume is entitled. Long Flies and covers the development of long fly designs and log fly tactics. It will include 16 full-color pages of long fly designs from their origins until today–I’m tying these right now. One of these is the Fort Wayne Bucktail, The first fly to use the “bucktail” monicker. Below is a paragraph excerpted from our book.
The term “bucktail,” as applied to a fly style, seems to have been coined by John P. Hance of Fort Wayne, Indiana. In Streamer Fly Tying and Fishing, Bates states that (Hance)…“brought forth a long hair-wing fly for bass called the ‘Fort Wayne Bucktail,’ …dated 1886.” It was more like a modern bucktail in its design with a tail of red and yellow feather fibers topped with a strip of woodduck flank feather, an orange body ribbed with gold tinsel, and a sizable clump of bucktail hair tied in specifically like a wing. And, like Gordon’s Bumblepuppy, Hance’s imitation was specifically built to represent a baitfish. And note—it was originally designed for bass.
The Fort Wayne Bucktail