Posts: 313
Location: On your favorite spot | All I know is what I learned from my own experience with maribou and what I've observed with other maribou baits.
It's gowdawful ugly once it gets wet but it doesn't matter, it will dry and it will be fine next time you get it wet, so don't worry about that. It does help to shake it out after use and hang it or set it on a rag so the colors don't bleed on your boat carpet.
When tying maribou, I've found it better to just tie 2 or 3 feathers at a time. Make sure you have a good thread base on your coil. Your base feathers should be a little longer, 3, 3.5 inches at most. Cut off the thickest part of the base, because that thick stuff really takes up alot of room on the coil and doesn't flow well like the tips of the feathers do. Except on the base layers, I rarely use more than half of the feather.
So do a couple foundation layers with long feathers. Keep rotating your coil and fill in the gaps, and as you add more layers, use shorter and shorter feathers to cover up the lower half of the base feathers. Just keep covering the bases of other feathers with the best parts of the maribou, ending up with a layer or two of the top 1 or 1.5 inches of the feather.
Basically, from top down of your clump, you shouldn't be able to see the shafts of any feathers, just the fluffy stuff. Put a finishing layer of flashabou on your clump and you've got one nice bucktail.
Even though the feathers are long, it's better to tie multiple clumps like this instead of one big long clump. If you are able to check out a Mepps Maribou or really any other bait you will see what I mean by layering different lengths.
It does take some practice and you'll waste a little maribou doing it but I love the stuff and you'll get better as you go. I can send pics if you want, which will probably be better than my ranting directions. |
