Olive Searching Pattern

This soft hackle wet fly is a general, non-specific, representation of an olive or grey-olive insect pupa. It may be taken for a chirononmid pupa or perhaps an ascending olive nymph or just some other potential item of trout prey.

It is really simple to tie, the abdomen and rib being made of tying thread, the thorax some grey rabbit fur and the hackle is just soft hen tied fairly short. Run the thread (olive 8/0) down to the rear of the hook (size 14 kamasan B410) back up to the eye and then back down the shank again. Winding the thread back up in wide, open turns creates the rib of the fly: always a really nice subtle touch to your fly bodies! Once you have reached the point just beyond where the thorax will start, touch dub some grey rabbit fur and include some guard hairs too. Loosely dub the thorax and comb the dubbing back towards the bend of the hook. Once you have wound the rest of dubbing to form a nicely shaped and tapered thorax, you can tie in the brown-olive hen hackle. I selected one where the fibres weren’t too long and I used just enough turns to create a neat, even hackle, without it becoming too rigid and bulky.

This fly should appeal to trout feeding on green or olive  chironomid pupa or other small green/olive food items. Olive is such a fantastic colour to incorporate into your fly patterns and I am sure many of the insect pupa adopt this colour as camouflage while living in amongst the weedbeds. That rabbit thorax should also help to trap air bubbles when the soft hackle is cast adding to its natural looking appearance. The hen hackle should also do a good job at representing legs or wings that are about emerge. Therefore it may be interesting to try fishing it in the surface film using some fly floatant to represent a hatching insect or just a few inches below the surface during a hatch of olive coloured flies. I am thinking that this will make a good searching pattern too.

So, there you have my fly no. 41. A simple, olive coloured, searching pattern to use at depth and which should also work well when fished in the film and just underneath it during a hatch. Thank you for reading.

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