The Lifejacket Nymph is tied with 2mm diameter silicone gasket foam
The Lifejacket Nymph is tied with 2mm diameter silicone gasket foam which I found by accident on Amazon while looking for something else entirely. Sometimes search engine serendipity throws up something intriguing that looks like it might have potential at the vice. I bought some at £6 for 8.5 metres, which is enough for an awful lot of flies.
The silicone foam is extruded like spaghetti and is designed to be pushed into a channel to form a tight seal around windows, pipes or whatever else needs a robust flexible seal. It floats, but not like a cork, it’s buoyancy is somewhat above neutral density. It adds just enough buoyancy to a nymph to allow it to hang in the surface film as it were anticipating hatching in the next minute or so.
Being small it’s possible to form a wing case from two pieces of the foam tied side by side and then folded forward. This lets you add a length of tinsel in the valley between the foam pieces to imitate a gas bubble forming as the wing case splits prior to the nymph hatching. The abdomen is tied using acrylic darning yarn which when twisted tightly as it’s wrapped up the hook yields a slim segmented body behind the wing case.
Drop it in water without adding any floatant and the fly will hang in the surface film with just its head poking out, just like real nymphs as they start the process of emerging. Add a light coating of floatant to the wing case and the thorax dubbing and it will sit up higher in the water and imitate a later stage of hatching.
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