Moscone

By Luca Montanari

Numerous insects that spend their lives in the fields or in the forests often have the opportunity to move close to banks of water courses, sometimes with the intention of drinking or collecting nectar from flowers that grow along rivers. However, their approach to the water may have an unlucky outcome: an unexpected breath of wind, a hazardous aerial manoeuvre, or an urgent desire to drink can induce them to land abruptly on the surface of the river, becoming in this way the vulnerable target of fish attacks. Trout as well as grayling and dace learn to recognise them as tasty prey.

Many fly tiers have developed numerous types of dressing to reproduce the shape of diptera, lepidoptera, and coleoptera, etc, on a hook. Many of these artificials have contributed to the development of particular strategies for alluring the fish – we can just think of the Daddy-long-legs for “dapping” fishing on the lakes, or to palmers, like the Bivisible, for “beating” fishing on the rivers populated by daces.
Generally terrestrials can be used with luck as an alternative to the traditional dry flies, especially when we suppose that our finned adversaries are accustomed to most common imitations of up-wings and sedges, but they are unable to identify the trick present in flies with strange or unusual shapes. Our preference can therefore fall on a Moscone, which can stimulate the curiosity of a trout or a dace with its combination of colours, but also with its similar appearance to a Musca domestica: a popular diptera that lives everywhere and that sometimes ends in the stomachs of the fish. In fact, in the beauty season, it is easy to observe these insects flying in proximity of the water courses, looking for sugar and nectar on the fresh plants that grow along the river banks, with the result that some of them fall into the river and then are attacked from the fish. To claim that trout or dace can specialise themselves in a selective diet prevalently composed of houseflies is absurd; anyway these bugs are very attractive to the fish, maybe because they are rather appetising.

	Materials List:
Hooks:	Mustad Signature R30, size 14 to 12
Thread:	Black
Body:	Dubbing of anthracite grey polypropylene
Wings:	The points of two blue dun cock neck hackles
Thorax:	Dubbing of natural dark grey-cul-de canard fibres mixed with blue dun cock hackle fibres
Thorax cover:	Orange black barred golden pheasant tippet feather

Tying instructions:

Step 1:
The elemental structure of Moscone is an evident indication of how easy it is to build the fly. In fact, no step of its tying is particularly difficult, so everybody can manage to tie it.
I start to prepare my imitation by fixing the hook on the vice jay and tying on the black thread. Next, I wax a short stretch of thread and apply a pinch of anthracite grey polypropylene to it, to make a compact dubbing. The dubbing is then used to form the fly body along the rear two-thirds of the hook shank.

Photos and fly by Luca Montanari

Step 2:
Cut off a small orange black-barred feather from a golden pheasant tippet. I tie it in by its tip, fixing it in front of the abdomen at “twelve o’clock” of the hook shank, ensuring its bright side faces the body.

Step 3:
I clamp a small bulldog clip onto the fibres of two natural dark grey cul-de-canard feathers and of a long blue dun cock neck hackle (the three feathers should be arranged one on the top of the other). With a pair of very sharp scissors, I trim away the feather fibres caught by the bulldog clip close to the point where they are attached to their stalks.

Step 4:
I form a dubbing loop with the black thread and insert in it the blades of the bulldog clip holding the cul de canard and the cock hackle fibres. I make a few turns of the dubbing spinner to increase the tension of the thread, then I slowly open up the bulldog clip whilst removing it from the thread loop. The thread will spin itself around the freed fibres to form a mixed rope of CDC and hackle.

Step 5:
With the compacted dubbing, I form a gauzy thorax to the fly by winding it around the front third of the hook shank. Next, with the scissors, I reduce the length of all those cul-de-canard fibres that appear too long. I now take two long, broad hackles from a blue dun cock neck and I tie them in so they project in a “V”, flat on each side of the body to represent the wings of the imitation. For reasons of stability on the water, the wings must extend backwards for a length equivalent to one and half times that of the hook shank.

Step 6:
I take the golden pheasant tippet feather, I bring it over the thorax and I bind it closely behind the hook eye: this creates the fly’s thorax cover.

Step 7:
Using a few turns of thread, I make the artificial’s head which is then finished with a whip-finish and with a small drop of clear varnish.

Luca Montanari

Moscone

Fishing

Moscone

Tying instructions: