Viktor Sermek..

5. September 1993.

A new friend ‘appeared on the stage’ - Viktor Sermek  from Vienna. He spent a vacation near my home together with two German friends of mine. He is of Croatian parentage and has taken some ideas with him from the land of his father - and he demonstrated them to me in the former farmhouse, they had rented for a week. He had learned the method from Mladen Merkas:

He uses a special two-cord tying thread - Serafil - it’s used in cloth-factories. He doesn’t wax the thread - turns it to the bend of the hook, where with a pair of tweezers he parts the two cords from where they leave the hook down to the bobbin-holder - keeps them separated with the little finger on the left hand and with the right fingers spin a loose dubbing on one of the cords - let the little finger ‘go’ - and he has the most beautiful dubbing-thread, which he winds up to the neck of the hook. He treats the body with a toothbrush, so it gets a fluffy appearance. He folds a Cul de Canard  feather (CdeC)  and ties it down on top of the hook (exactly in the same way we mount the wing on an ‘Europea 12’ from Ragot/France). Then he takes two CdeC-feathers and places them on top of each other’s - brushes the fibres in the direction of the ‘root’, to spread the fibres. With a pair of sharp scissors he cuts the tips, so the fibres have nearly the same length. He grasps the fibres on one side of the stem between the jaws of a small paper clip, so that half their length is inside the jaws. With a pair of scissors he cuts them from the stem and places the free fibres between the cords of the thread, which he has separated. Then he let his little finger ‘go’ and at the same time giving loose on the fibres between the jaws - and in a split second he has an artificial hackle of the right size for his dryfly. He turns it around the hook and between each turn brushes the fibres to the rear, and ends with a whip-finish-knot.

He tied an imitation of a hatching sedge pupa – Inspiration from the American Gary LaFontaine:

Winds the tying thread to the bend of the hook, where he ties down a big CdeC-feather by its tip. Winds it and ties down the stem in front of the woven hackle. As described above he makes a dubbing thread with Seal’s fur and wind to the neck. Then he folds the CdeC-fibres forward and ties them down and after two turns of thread he bends the surplus points back on top and sides of the fly and finish with knots over the fibres.

Viktor has fished many times on Gazka/Yugoslavia, and he told me that like me on many occasions, when Mayflies were hatching he had no results with an exact imitation. He preferred a fly created by Alois Celafiga

Hook: TDE size 10 - 18.

Tying thread: Light yellow waxed silk - also used as body.

Palmer-hackle: Brown grizzle cock in wide turns up over the body.

Wings: 10 - 20 hairs from Buck-tail, with the points to the rear and reaching to the bend. The front parts cut, so they form a sort of a ‘head’ on top of the hook in front of the fly.