“Hey, Al, look at this!” shouted Rob Miner as he threw a fly high into the air. The unusual pattern hit the ceiling and settled to the floor upright. From a distance the fly looked like a regular hair-wing Wulff, but on closer inspection the hackle seemed a real mess. “It’s a double parachute Frank Johnson [a Missoula, Montana, fly-shop owner] sent me. It always lands upright, and look at the footprint." Rob, the owner of the Fly Fisher Shoppe in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in the mid-1980s, tossed the fly again, allowing it to land on the glass reel case in his shop. When viewed from underneath, it certainly did look more natural than other dry flies, whether tied with standard or parachute hackles. Finally, Al had to ask, “What’s its name, and how do you tie it?” Rob indicated he knew how to tie it as he sat down at his fly-tying bench, but he didn’t think Frank had yet named the pattern.

Problems Solved
Al loved the way Water Walkers caught fish, but they did have three little problems. The two hackles tied off at the hook eye tended to clog the eye, especially on smaller flies. The feathers also seemed more prone to break than on other dry flies. And finally, Water Walkers took more than twice as long to tie as standard Wulffs. Al didn’t tie very many Water Walkers on a commercial basis, because he could make more money tying other patterns. The diffi-culty in making this pattern is probably why they’ve never attained a prominent place in the bins at fly shops, but Al always had a box of them for his personal fishing.
     When we got married in the early 1990s, we spent our first years together tying flies on a full-time commercial basis. During that period, we solved those first two problems, and will share our solutions with you in the tying exercises. Unfortunately, we still haven’t found a faster way to tie Water Walkers, so they still have limited commercial appeal; if you want some, you’ll have to tie them yourself. Don’t let this fly intimidate you, however, because it’s really not that difficult to tie; just don’t expect to fill a fly box in one evening. One thing is definitely for sure: Water Walkers do catch trout!