The flies for the final round of the League share a body material, stripped natural peacock quill or herl. To make stripped peacock quills we want a specific type of herl only found in peacock eye feathers; standard peacock herl is not suitable for this job, you will not find suitable strands in bundles or packets of loose peacock herl.

Herl is a barb which branches off the main stem. Herl barbs from the eye have relatively wide flat stem where they meet the stem of the eye feather. When the flue on the leading edge is stripped off it reveals a dark, sometimes black, stripe which contrasts with the lighter rear edge. The contrast between the sides of the quill allows us to create ‘segmented’ fly bodies.

I seem to have collected quite a few peacock eyes with less contrast than I would like – if you find your feathers are not too well marked don’t worry about it for the League flies.

Stripping
Finding the section of the eye we want is straightforward: look at the back of the feather and find the bald pale central area. The best quills are the longest and widest, in my experience they come from the sides of the eye.

There are several method for stripping herl: using a pencil eraser, scraping between finger and thumbnail, or you can get all chemical on them and burn or dissolve all the finer fibres away with bleach or hair remover. I’d stick with the simpler methods.

I pluck the herls off the stem and soaked them in water. Then, one at a time, put a strand on a hard smooth surface and erase; press firmly and draw the eraser towards the base of the strand. Repeat until the quill section is clean. Finger and nail is simpler but no quicker and soon gets irritating if cleaning a few quills at a time.

Peacock quills are not huge so the length of fly-body we can tie is limited. Try to reserve the longest quills for larger flies, short quills are perfectly adequate for dry fly bodies.

Hackles
The sample fly is a Ginger Quill. Tied as a dry the pattern calls for ginger cock hackle fibres, tied as a wet it requires either soft ginger cock or hen hackles. Please don’t get hung up on the colour of hackle for League flies – the challenge is to tie quill bodied flies and those come in a wide variety of shades and colours – any natural hackle colour is fine.

Wet flies require either hen hackle or a low grade cock hackle, eg natural Chinese. Hackle from high grade genetic cock or rooster capes is simply ‘too good’, too stiff. Again the specific colour or shade is not important.

Slip wings
Feather-slip wings are far from fashionable but they are both challenging and rewarding. Anglers have tied flies with feather-slip wings for hundreds of years and have developed many different ways to prepare, handle and mount the wings and at least two ways to position the slips against each other. I can’t go into them all here so this is a basic reminder of how to prepare and mount feather-slip wings.

Flight feathers are curved; as a general rule wing slips paired for dry flies should curve away from one another and for wet flies should curve towards one another. Conventional or traditional collar hackled dry-fly wings should be upright and wet-fly wings should lie back along the body of the fly. I prefer the longer side of the slip to be forwards on a dry and uppermost on a wet.

I can almost hear the rustle of pen on paper and the clack of finger on keyboard in response to those generalisations. Feather-slip wings can be formed and mounted in other ways: folded slips, short edge up etc. for the League flies the slips should be paired and mounted as I have described.

Many older dressings call for starling feathers, I prefer mallard and teal because they are more available, larger and more robust; mallard and teal were used for the tying sequence. For the League flies, feathers from any of those three birds are fine, if you have other similar grey feathers you would prefer to use that’s fine too.

As you look down a wing quill the material needed for winging has a single curve. Select a pair of feathers of similar size. Prepare by pulling off any soft fluffy stuff at the base of the shaft, I also get rid of any double curved stuff from the lower portion of the stem.

Cut a narrow slip or strip of feather from each of the paired feathers. Match the slips at the tips and check their widths. If one is wider, slide a needle into the slip and peel off the excess. The butt ends of the slips may not be the same lengths – even feathers taken from either wings of the same bird are just like that, it can help to trim the slips to roughly the same length – trim the butts not the tips.

When you present the paired slips to a hook you’ll begin to get an idea of how wide you want the wing to be. Wide wings create tying problems on both Dry and Wet flies, very narrow wings look mean on Wet flies. You can adjust the size of the paired slips by using a needle to remove fibres – you cannot add fibres once the slips are cut.

Measuring wing length is a matter of judgment. I use the hook length as a guide, for Wets I like the wing to be just slightly longer than the hook, for dries the length of the shank seems about right.

Measuring slips is not an exact science. The problem comes when you prepare to pinch and loop at the tying position which hides the wing pair between your thumb and finger. You can’t see exactly where the feather is sitting. Check the wing when it is tied. If you don’t like the length or the way the wing is are sitting, remove it and tie again. Wing slips usually allow you more than one attempt; in fact because the slips have been crushed and softened they may tie in more easily a second time. Ideally the wing fibres should crush down without the wings buckling or breaking apart.

Modern tying threads are far thinner and more slippery than the old, with care modern threads work fine when tying feather wings. Fine modern thread can chop through the fibres if pulled too hard and/or if you don’t allow the wing to move and crush down during the pinch and loop.

Waxing the thread with a grippy or tacky resinous wax helps hold the wing in place with just two turns of thread: I use beeswax, Fly Tyer’s wax (Veniard) or, my favourite, Cobblers Wax (available in some tackle shops and most bagpipe dealers!)

For my own tying (thanks to a class with Marvin Nolte) I pinch and loop between my thumb and either middle or fourth finger rather than forefinger, the pads of those fingers are at a better flatter angle to the surface of my thumb so the pinch is steadier smoother and more linear. During a pinch and loop the finger and thumb need to relax and roll back slightly as the thread is pulled tight but they still need to guide the material down into position.

Hooks and proportions
Hook sizes and proportions vary by make. Fly tyers can either stick to one hook brand or adjust what they do to suit the hooks they have – I adjust.

Some tying textbooks state that for traditional dries the hackle should be one and a half times the hook gape and the wing should be sized against the hook length – one or one and a half time the shank length. If you compare hook model and makes of the same size, the gapes tend to be similar but the shank lengths vary quite a bit. In my opinion, for a dry fly it is safer to size the wing to the length of the hook and the hackle to the length of the wing. That means, both the wing and hackle are sized using the same hook dimension.

For my own tying I want the wing to stick out fractionally above the collar of hackle fibres. When I get to that stage I select a suitable hackle by measuring against the wing which is already in place. That allows me to take into account both the diameter of the under-body and the wing length.