Hook Stealth Hooks C series curved wet fly / nymph hook, 10-14
Thread Orange 8/0
Materials
Rear hot spot Semperfli waxed thread, orange (built from the tying thread)
Body Nature's Spirit purple peacock feather (1 feather, tied in by the tip)
Rib / second hot spot Semperfli 0.1 mm wire, pink (3-4 in)
Hackle Whiting Farms Brahma hen (1 feather, oversized)
Head Solarez Bone Dry UV resin (1 thin coat)
How to tie it
Mount a Stealth C series hook, size 14, and tilt it nose-down in the vice. Svend does this deliberately: the body and hot spot run well into the bend on this fly, and angling the hook down is the only comfortable way to work back there.
Start orange waxed thread behind the eye and run it back level with the barb, then keep going round the bend. Further than you think you should. Wrap back over yourself with touching wraps so the orange reads as one solid blob. That is the first hot spot.
Cut three or four inches of 0.1 mm pink wire and tie it in along the underside of the shank. Keeping wire underneath rather than on top is what keeps the underbody uniform, and it is worth practising on every fly so thread bodies come out clean later.
Run the thread up and down the shank four, five, six times to build a deliberately bulky underbody. The peacock then sits proud and reads bigger and more defined.
Reset the hook back to level. Tie in the tip of a purple peacock feather and bind it down to just short of where the wire emerges, leaving a small gap for the wire hot spot.
Brush a little Zap-a-Gap over the thread underbody before wrapping. Peacock is fragile and this is pure durability.
Palmer the peacock forward, keeping the fibres running the same way and not twisting the stem in your fingers. Do not pull hard. It breaks. Tie off behind the eye, pull the stub back to lock it, and snip the peacock out.
Take three or four touching wraps of the pink wire at the very back for the second hot spot, keeping clear of the loose fibres at the rear of the feather.
Carry on forward with the wire in open counter-wrapped turns through the peacock. It stops the herl coming apart, and it adds flash and segmentation at the same time. Tie off behind the eye and snip.
Select a Brahma hen feather from the lower part of the cape, taking the section with the speckle in it and discarding the fluff and the plain fibres behind. Oversize it. Soft hackles want long fibres.
Prep by the tip: grab the tip, preen the fibres back to make a clean tie-in point, and tie it in tip first with the tag forward, then fold the fibres back over. That grips far better than tying in a bare triangle of stem, and it starts building the head.
Snip the tip out flush against the thread. Stroke every fibre back and take two or three turns, crossing the stem with a wrap of thread as you finish and pulling down. Keep it sparse rather than full.
Whip finish twice, the second pass tidies any thread frayed on the hook point, then cut. Pull the stem gently forward to find it against the fibres and snip it out.
Set the fibres so they stand with a little profile rather than laying flat, then run Solarez Bone Dry over the head, letting a touch bleed into the fibre bases so they stiffen where you set them. Cure.