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The traditional Catskill-style dry fly was designed to float on just the tips of the hackle barbs and the tail - thus keeping the hook clear of the water. Doing this required high quality hackle that was stiff enough to stand perpendicular to the hook. Since hackle feathers are often cupped a bit - concave on the dull side - facing the dull side forward aided in keeping the hackles in the proper shape. This was especially important when using the low quality hackles available a generation ago that were often both badly cupped and a bit soft. If the shiny (convex) side of such a feather is tied forward the cupped hackle barbs will tend to lean back toward the hook bend and won't support the fly as high on the water as they would if they were reversed.
Note: By contrast, the traditional wet fly was always tied with the shiny side forward in order to purposely allow the hackle barbs to lean toward the tail. A cupped feather aided the process and helped make the hackle barbs look like incipient legs of an emerging insect.
The down side of tying the dull side forward on a dry fly, especially if the feathers being used have a pronounced cupped shape, is that it is hard to get the feather tied off without catching stray barbs in the head of the fly. If one crowds the head of the fly (a common mistake of beginning tyers) the result can be a mess, to say nothing of the way stray barbs can clog the eye of the hook.
Nowadays, however, the situation has changed. Modern genetic hackles are both stiffer and less likely to have a pronounced cupped shape (if you are careful when buying) than the hackles of yesteryear. With regard to shape, therefore, it is less important which side is forward than it once was. If tying the shiny side forward helps in creating a neat, small head, it is often the way to go. It is an especially useful technique when tying a hackle collar on a downwing fly on which the tie-in point of the wing creates a downward slope toward the eye of the hook. Shiny side forward the hackles on such a fly will stand up the way they are supposed to and be extremely easy to tie off.
Another issue is the way you want the fly to float. Research shows that the body of a dry fly is an important trigger in inducing a strike Thus getting the body down on the water surface is an advantage. The old Catskill fly kept the body high off the water where it was obscured by the (often too heavy) hackle collar. This led some tyers to clip the hackle barbs from the bottom of their flies and eventually produced parachute, thorax and comparadun style flies as a replacement for the older Catskill patterns.
The bottom line in all this is therefore a simple one: with high quality hackles it is unnecessary to be overly rigid about which way you tie in the hackle. If one ways works better for you than the other, by all means do it that way and forget tradition. Results are what counts.
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