Green Chartreuse Grizzly Chickabou Body Marabou Patch

Green Chartreuse Grizzly Ewing Chickabou Marabou Body Patch

Chartreuse is the color you tie on when the water goes off and nothing else shows up. Green Chartreuse Grizzly takes that loud color and puts natural black bars on it, so the fly reads like baitfish scales instead of a highlighter. That’s why it’s the collar on my Gold Digger streamer.

Green Chartreuse Grizzly Ewing Chickabou gives you barred chartreuse fibers for streamer collars, pike-fly accents and bass flies. It pulses on the pause and cuts through stained water when other colors disappear.

Brown trout, rainbows, cutthroat, largemouth, smallmouth and pike.

Recipe 1: Capt. Grumpy’s Chartreuse Grizzly Gold Digger

This is the fly I tie and sell as the Chartreuse Grizzly Gold Digger Streamer. Browns eat it every month of the year, and bass hit it just as hard.

• Hook: Partridge Ideal SUJ, #8–#12
• Thread: Semperfli Classic 6/0, red
• Underbody: Flash mix of pearl Krystal Flash, Semperfli Chartreuse Krinkle, Skeena Gold Blend and Angel Hair
• Wing/Tail: Ewing Green Chartreuse Grizzly Marabou, one feather each side
• Body: Nature’s Spirit Predator Dub, chartreuse
• Throat/Hackle: Golden pheasant flank under mallard flank dyed wood duck
• Collar: Green Chartreuse Grizzly Ewing Chickabou

Tying:

1. Set the hook in the vise and lay a red thread base along the shank.
2. Tie the flash mix down the center of the shank so it runs back past the bend. This is the flash that shows through the body.
3. Tie in one grizzly marabou feather on each side. Bend them in toward each other for a slim fly that cuts current and gets down. Splay them out for a wide fly that breathes and pushes water.
4. Make a see-through 1¼-inch cluster of Predator Dub. Fold it around the hook and back over itself to build a body with bulk you can still see through.
5. Tie in a few golden pheasant flank fibers as a throat, then wood-duck mallard flank over them for barring and a flash of gold.
6. Wrap the Green Chartreuse Grizzly chickabou as the collar, stroking the fibers back between turns.
7. Whip-finish. The red thread makes the head.

How to fish: Swing it across and down, strip it hard off the bank, or dead-drift it through deep seams and twitch it. Change your retrieve until the fish tell you what they want. Use a sink-tip in faster water to keep it in the zone. Fish the slim version in current and the splayed version in slow pools, lakes and bass ponds.

Recipe 2: Green Chartreuse Grizzly Chickabou Pike Fly

• Hook: Saltwater 3/0–4/0, with a 30-lb wire bite tippet
• Thread: Chartreuse 210-denier
• Tail: 4 chartreuse saddle hackles, plus gold and pearl flash
• Body: Green Chartreuse Grizzly Ewing Chickabou, two plumes wrapped as a full body
• Collar: White bucktail underneath, chartreuse grizzly chickabou on top
• Head: Chartreuse Predator Dub, trimmed wide, with large 3D eyes

Tying: Wrap the chickabou body thick so the fly keeps its shape when wet. Trim the head wide and flat so the fly glides and wobbles on the pause.

How to fish: Pike sit along weed edges in spring and fall. Use an intermediate line, make long strips with long pauses, and watch for a follow. When a pike follows to the boat, speed up or make a hard turn. Always use a wire bite tippet.