This is my attempt at Cutcliffe's #26. Like #14 in the video before this is one of the few flies where the body is not fur. A lot of tiers have taken "peacock tail" to imply herl...but he has a pattern that lists "peacock harl" as the body...so what is tail? Well Cutcliffe is very "matchy" in his patterns. He matches the color scheme of the hackle with that of the body...so if the hackle in this pattern is "rusty blue" then the body must come close to that. It turns out peacocks have a set of "support" feathers behind the flashy feathers where we get eyes and herl. Those support feathers have this "rusty blue" tone. This MUST be the material for the body.
The hackle I use is a saddle hackle which is what I could get in the color. The real pattern used a cape feather I am sure. As with all of Cutcliffe's patterns the fiber length of the hackle is measured as the length on the shank plus a little. The fibers are also doubled...so that instead of being on two sides of the stem they are folded onto one side. A quick search in YouTube will bring up some great videos demonstrating how to prepare the hackle.
Sadly I ran out of peacock tail fibers to make this more of a balanced fly and ended up needing to make a bigger head than planned...but the fly will fish. Please do better than me!
I hope you enjoy it and try some of these Cutcliffe stiff hackle wets! Just start with the feather and match the color with your choice of fur dubbing for the body and voila you have it.
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