Enhancer

I came by a second-hand box of dubbing additive the other day, so I’ve been busy at the vice trying it out. The clear plastic box with the familiar layout of twelve small cubicles filled with dubbing came from South Africa, judging by the faded price tag in SA Rand on the base. I gave a fiver for the box and consider that a fair price as the purple colour had faded badly to the point where it was just a lavender tinted whitish shade. No matter, the rest of the colours were vibrant and I was eager to use this material to tart up some old patterns.

This synthetic material is every so slightly shiny, nothing like as bold as your glister or similar products. The fibres are very, very fine and easy to mix in with other furs. That’s good because when I tried to dub some straight on to waxed silk it proved to be resistant to my vigorous rubbing. Once mixed into other fur in small quantities I found it dubbed no problem. There is no sign of a brand name on the box but I suspect this could be a Waspi product since they used to have something suspiciously similar for sale. The 12 colours are white, yellow, orange, red, fl. pink, purple, fl. chartreuse, green, olive, ginger, brown and black. The ginger looks more like a pale brown-olive to me. As most of you will know, I am a divil for adding tiny quantities of different colours to my dubbings so this enhancer was mana from heaven for me.

So what could I use this stuff for? The first thing that came to mind was to use a wee blob of the orange as a tag on a Fiery Brown. Far from original, I have added an orange tag to my Fiery Brown’s for years, some with a couple of turns of globrite floss, others with dubbed fur. The orange enhancer mixed with orange fur looked good when I added a tag at the tail of a size 10. Those flies are now tucked up in my box for next spring when the Fiery Brown is at its deadliest.

A Wickhams Fancy often finds its way on to my leader and variations of all sorts line my boxes. By adding a small thorax of Fl. pink enhancer mixed in with some bubble-gum pink mohair to a Muddled Wickhams I feel I may have a real winner on my hands. The fly has that bit of pink in it but is not as brash as the Pink-tailed Wickham. The body hackle was deliberately tied very long to give maximum movement.

Of course I had to try the red enhancer on the end of a Green Peter. Mixing it 50/50 with red seals fur, I dubbed a little on the end of the body of an otherwise fairly standard dressing. The head hackle is a light ginger instead of red game, a shade I find useful for this time of the season.

In general, I am not a huge fan of synthetics but a little can definitely add that bit of extra pulling power on occasion. This ‘enhancer’ is easy to mix with other dubbing but is difficult to use on its own, the individual fibres being slippery and unwilling to stick to the silk even when it is well waxed. Like so many other products on the market it gives us fly tyers something different to work with. As inveterate tinkerers we all enjoy messing around with patterns. This wee box of coloured fluff I got for a fiver has now been added to my burgeoning collection to allow me even more options.

It is only August but the year feels old already. The garden back at home is showing the first signs of Autumn and with little prospect of any serious fishing on the horizon I am focussing on fly tying for now. At a guess, I’d say I have about 3,000 hooks of different types waiting in the fly tying kit. That is an awful lot of flies to be tied up so I plan to work through as many of those as I can over the long cold winter ahead of me.

In other news, the horrid old Renault which been my ride for the last couple of years met an untimely end at the hand of the NCT inspector in Westport last weekend. He took a very dim view of the black smoke emanating from the end of the exhaust. It would have been easy to fix that with 4 new injectors, but at 400 quid each I felt that was a bridge too far and so off she went to the scrapyard. I’d like to say I am sorry to see it go but in truth I never liked that car, it was annoying to drive and the electrics were undoubtedly designed by a lunatic on LSD. I’ve replaced that old banger with – another old banger! There is some method in my apparent madness though. I am driving many miles each week as I commute to work in the midlands, so a new car would quickly rack up a high mileage. An elderly but reliable car which will see me to retirement felt like a much more sensible option. And so I’m now running around in a teensy-weensy 2005 Toyota Yaris. Actually, it is a surprisingly nice car to drive. Let’s hope it sees me through the next 18 months.