That’s RIGHT FOLKS! Friday Night Flies is back! Well, it’s back at least when I tie something and photograph it in time to present it on a Friday evening that is. Due to circumstances beyond my control there has been a long absence since the last ‘Friday Night Flies’. But here we are! So, without further delay… here’s what I’ve been attempting.

So, obviously this is one of the orange and black varieties. It took me some time tying as the first two did NOT turn out so well in my opinion. I just wasn’t paying attention to the proportions of things and how they sat on the hook.

I’m using a Gamakatsu B10S ‘stinger’ style hook – size 4. It has a little offset (if I’m using that term correctly) where the hook point seems to be at an angle that is not in line with the hook shank. Well, that’s the first thing I ‘correct’. I bend the shank so it’s in line with the hook point. I got this version of tying a cicada from YouTube (YT). If you want to get the link, I tell you what, email me at slaterunsportsmen@gmail.com and I’ll send you the link to where I got this recipe.

Making the wings was a little bit of a puzzle to me at first. The process is shown in the YT video as simply making a pair of ‘wing-burners’ – you know – similar to those things we’ve all seen to burn a set of caddis wings? It’s essentially a ‘mask’ for burning away unwanted material while saving what you want to the exact profile that you want. You put a folded sheet of the organza material between the burning ‘templates’ and then you burn away unwanted material. The result is a wing shaped to the profile you will tie onto the fly. Well, when I tried what was shown exactly on the YT video – well mine didn’t turn out exactly like what was shown.

No matter how I tried, very carefully melting the excess away or burning as fast as I could go – I was’nt getting a wing that I could use. So, I take to pondering the situation over and the wife says ‘Why not coat the material with head cement?’ I was already thinking of this when she mentioned it. Head cement is too thick in my opinion and I let her know it (see I’m not shy about letting her know what I think and she tells me on occasion that maybe I could restrain myself sometimes).

I’m setting down in the den the next day daydreaming or doing something and I happen to scan over the desk next to the big window and I spy a can of spray acrylic just sitting there due to gravity I suppose! A ‘light-bulb’ moment goes off! Spray acrylic… hmmmmm! Yep, it was the trick I was looking for. I sprayed a modest piece of material and cut out a piece that I could use with my wing burners (that I previously made) on the enhanced material. Viola! The edges melted away as neatly as possible. I also previously tried using a heat gun to burn away the excess material – it didn’t work so well but I kept it in mind for the time I started coating the material with acrylic spray. The combination of using the heat gun and spraying the winging material BEFORE I tried to ‘burn’ the wings … simply worked. As I say it was ‘the cat’s meow’.

All that was left was combining all the materials onto a hook and BAM, off I go to slay the cicada hungry trout! Well, hold on to your horses! If it were only that easy I might start to get a big head and start bragging on how great a fly tier I am. I DID NOT start bragging and for good reason – apparently I am NOT a great fly tyer as assembling the components onto this hook didn’t turn out quite as expected. I guess I expected that the materials would just jump onto the hook shank and I’d be making dozens of these things before you know it. As of this writing I’ve tied three….. yes 3! I’ll get on it tomorrow as it’s late Friday night and I’m going to go watch some of the Olympics I think tonight before I fall into a slumber.

So, anyway, it was an interesting experience with this tie. Things didn’t work quite the same as what was presented on the YouTube video but it intrigued me and I thought about it, conjured up alternatives and experimented with those alterations in process. Yep, what I described above (I believe) is how a product is affected by a process – Process Control. The winging material needed to be treated before I could preform the shaping function of burning away the edges. The material needed an addition process in order for me to attain the result I wanted (the spraying of the acrylic onto the organza material). Once the process was established the product achieved it’s desired result!

Anyway, I think this is a good example of having the correct materials but it was the processing of them in a different manner that got the result that I wanted – a set of cicada wings that I could tie onto a hook shank.

Well, I’m looking forward to the 24th or 36th one to see if I can consistently tie this cicada. I think I saw a distribution map online that shows the south is expected to experience peak cicada hatching (Brood X) this year (where a variety of cicadas end up hatching on the same year cycle). However, I thought I saw where up here, in Lycoming county and possibly Tioga – NEXT YEAR is supposed to be ‘the year’ for a rather significant cicada hatch.

So, is it this year or 2025? I suppose time will tell. No matter, I think I have a ‘template’ of a tie now that I can modify to suit a couple different species (with color change to the materials and resizing as needed).

So if you happen to plop one down and get a rather disturbing smash on a cicada you happen to be fishing, I wish you the best possible success! And, till we see each other again, I’m UB, and ‘Unintentional’ Blogger.