Royal Wulff

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May 30th, 2008

Royal Wulff

NIB Royal Wulff Ambush Triangle Taper J3 fly line 6f a+

$41.00

WULFF ROYAL – 12 flies – # 14, 16, 18

$9.67

I like the royal Wulff Fly, but is it different in any way from the Royal Coachman?

I love to fish with the royal wulff, but a friend recommended a royal coachman, he said they work tons better, but is there a difference?

Okay, let me see if I can get this right. The Coachman is a very old fly that probably originated in Europe in the 1700s or earlier, but don’t quote me on that. In any case, it’s considered a “traditional fly,” as in we don’t know who invented it. I don’t know if anyone even uses it anymore. The Coachman was basically peacock herl and brown Wet Fly hackle. Nothing fancy at all. An American fly tier named John Haily is the inventor of the Royal Coachman, which is a pattern that takes the old Coachman and fortifies it with red thread bands and the barred Tail Feathers. So, from the Coachman, an old traditional fly, we get the Royal Coachman. The original Coachman and Royal Coachman were Wet Flies and, like most flies of that time, they were nonrepresentational. That is, they were attractor patterns that did not imitate any one form of trout forage — might look like a nymph, maybe a minnow, maybe a terrestrial.

Now you need to know about Lee Wulff. He is an American fly fishing innovator from the early-mid-1900s. He did a LOT to advance the art and sport of fly fishing, too much to say here, but two things he did were to make fly fishing tackle lighter and more compact, and he helped to advance the art of dry flies. He is the inventor of the original Wulff flies, obviously. The first Wulff flies were basically very high-floating dry flies, named after the main color of the materials — White Wulff, Gray Wulff, etc. Wulff invented the Royal Wulff by basing a new Dry Fly on the old Royal Coachman, with the body of peacock herl, bands of red thread, and barred tail feathers. So, you could say that the Royal Wulff is an evolution of the Royal Coachman, which was based on the Coachman (which was probably based on something even earlier).

Most of the Royal Coachman flies I see in shops are dry flies, and most of the Royal Coachman recipes I see are for dry flies, or perhaps you might call them dry-wets. The Royal Wulff is and always was a dry. Do they fish differently? Yeah. Most Wulff flies are designed to ride very high on the water and are great for skittering and waking attacks. Is one of these flies “tons better” than the other? Probably not. They are both attractors and if a fish hits one of them, that same fish probably would have hit the other.