An ingenious split-winged single feather mayfly imitation by ace Italian CDC expert, Agostino Roncallo – a wonderful pattern that almost outdoes his celebrated Mirage dry fly for simplicity and elegance!

Says Agostino:

I like patterns I can tie easily with just one CDC hackle and in my books, “Magie in CDC” and “Il CDC a modo mio”, I included several designs.

The first of these flies was the Mirage, but there are others that draw on the Mirage’s concept of construction. On this occasion, I propose to tie a no-hackle fly that has split wings created from a single of CDC hackle. The fly is slender and extremely effective in slow running waters.

Click in images to enlarge them

1. Dress your dry fly hook and tie in a small bunch of cock hackle fibres as tails.

2. Stroke out the fibres along the spine of a CDC hackle, as if you were going to tie a Mirage dry fly.

3. Form a simple, smooth body with the black thread and tie in the CDC hackle just ahead of it.

4. Add dubbing to a section of the thread. The dubbing is of your choice.

5. Lift up the CDC hackle out of the way and dub in a thorax.

6. Grab the CDC by its quill and pull it onto the thorax leaving the remaining fibres to form the wings. Fix the quill next to the eye of the hook and trim off the excess.

7. Lift up the ‘extended body’ end of the CDC feather and thread it through the wing fibres so as to divide them in half. Pull it down firmly and tie it in near the eye of the hook. Trim off the excess.

8. Form a neat head and tie off with a whip finish tool.

9. Take the fly out of the vice and trim off any excess  wing fibres.

10. The finished fly from the side...