I tie a lot of cracklebacks and vary both underbody and hackle. The basic is still the yellow floss, herl over top, and grizzly hackle, not wound too tight so as to hide the body and herl. I also like to put a tail on them if they are going to primarily fished dry.
Never heard that fly called a crackleback, and I know for sure all the old timers around there did not call it that. This would have been in the late 70s. My Dad worked part time in a store where the owner, he was OLD at that time, had been tying flies since the 30s. He never called them anything but a Woolly Worm, and said that yellow/peacock/grizz had been around forever. I remember him telling me, "No right or wrong way to fish it, just get it in the water!" In fact I had never heard the term until I was looking at the feathercraft website several years ago and read all the BS about it on there, and looked for how to tie it, and found a Woolly Worm. Add to that, they want to charge you a buck-fifty for a sheet of paper telling you how to tie this miracle fly...
how to tie a crackleback fly
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