What is a Flymph?

What makes a flymph can be confusing. The best explanation I have read was from an interview I did with Carl Sanders. I will be posting this interview in the near future. But I thought it was important to go ahead and post what characteristics make a Flymph. Here is what Carl wrote in his answer.

"Hidy gives the reader his definition of a flymph in The Art of Tying the Wet Fly and Fishing the Flymph. It is pretty straight forward and clear. Staunch traditionalists will stick tight to this description, however, I’m not entirely sure this is what Hidy intended. I say this because the definition he wrote in the book also includes how a flymph is to be fished, but I know there were many different presentations employed by Hidy himself which he mentions later on in the following chapters and other published material. With that being said, there are certainly characteristics of a flymph pattern that set it apart from other wet flies. It is a wingless wet fly meant to mimic an actively emerging insect struggling to reach the surface or drifting in or just under the surface in the active emerging dun stage. A properly constructed flymph has no equal for this purpose. The flymph body is constructed of dubbing twisted between two strands of thread. This is purposeful and a signature of the flymph. The dubbing and the thread work in harmony, blending together colors to match natural insects. This also provides an extremely durable body with a depth and translucence in which the fibers will dance in active movement in conjunction with the soft hackle under the water’s surface. This is often misunderstood when it comes to dubbing soft hackled flies. Twisting the thread and dubbing together blends the colors, touch dubbing covers the thread, and no matter how sparse, the effect is quite different. The bodies of flymphs are comparatively quite robust, more so than lightly dubbed spider patterns or some other soft hackled patterns where the the dubbing is sparsely applied to the thread. An overall cigar-shaped taper is most desirable. One other characteristic the flymph tyer should consider is what the design mimics. As I said, it represents any number of actively emerging insects making their way to the surface. Any additions to the pattern that lead the fly fisher away from this type of presentation naturally removes the pattern from the definition of a flymph.

For example, adding a bead to the pattern would negate it from being a flymph because a bead’s purpose is the the exact opposite of what the flymph fisher is trying to accomplish when fishing a flymph."