Martyn White | Thursday, 18 December 2025
This week's fly of the week is another exercise in perfection. I'm really spoiling you, but it is nearly Christmas. What is this perfect fly? Bob Wyatt's deer hair emerger of course.
When I sung the praises of the shipman's buzzer, its simplicity was one of the key features, but Bob's DHE takes this to another level. Using only deer hair and dubbing along with the hook and thread Bob produced a fantastic dry fly that is highly generic and can represent any of the mayfly, caddis or midge species you're likely to encounter on both rivers and stillwaters. And it'll do a job on terrestrial feeders too!
It really is the kind of fly I love, rough and generalistic, quick to tie and crucially very effective. It offers a very nice footprint and silhouette that just looks like food. Being so prototypical you can essentially tie them in any size or colour and expect them to work, although the basic hare's lug will do 90% of the time. If it doesn't it might well be user error that's the issue - something I know only too well. The only limiting factor is really the size of your deer hair which makes smaller sizes a bit tricky. Fear not! Bob has you covered, switch out the deer hair for snow shoe and tie everything the same way and you'll have no problem going down to a 20 or smaller.
Here's the dressing:
Hook: Kamasan B100 or equivalent
Thread: 8/0 Uni or whatever you like
Wing: Deer hair-roe is good or snow shoe hare's foot
Body: Spikey hare's ear dubbing or similar
That's it, nothing else needed. You can, of course, add tinsel ribs, shucks and other carry on if you feel compelled to, but don't bother there's really no need. Here's a video of Bob tying the snow shoe emerger, I couldn't find one of him doing the DHE but the tying sequence is essentially the same.