Medium Dun Grizzly Chickabou-Marabou Body Patch

Text content

Medium Dun Grizzly is slate gray with dark bars. Hold it next to an alewife, a gizzard shad or a big drake nymph and you’ll see why tyers love it. It’s the natural gray-and-barred look of a lot of the biggest meals in fresh and salt water.

Medium Dun Grizzly Ewing Chickabou gives you barred gray fibers for baitfish tails and backs, nymph gills, and streamer collars. Pair it with white for an instant two-tone baitfish.

Striped bass, hybrid stripers, trout, smallmouth and walleye.

Recipe 1: Medium Dun Grizzly Chickabou Alewife Streamer

• Hook:  Partridge Sea Streamer, 1/0–2/0
• Thread: White 140-denier
• Tail: White chickabou topped with Medium Dun Grizzly Ewing Chickabou, plus 4 strands silver flash
• Body: Natures Spirit Predator Dub or Semperfli Predator Fiber, white underneath and gray on top
• Back: Medium Dun Grizzly chickabou, a full plume tied on top as a topping
• Eyes: 3D eyes, large, glued at the head

Tying: Stack white on the bottom and the grizzly on top. The bars on top and white belly underneath copy an alewife’s countershading. Keep the profile tall and narrow.

How to fish: When stripers or hybrids push bait in spring, fish it on an intermediate line near the surface. Use fast, erratic strips with occasional pauses. A wounded alewife darts, stops, and flutters.

Recipe 2: Medium Dun Grizzly Chickabou Drake Nymph

• Hook: 3XL nymph, #8–#10
• Bead: Gold tungsten, plus 8 wraps lead-free wire
• Thread: Brown 6/0
• Tail: Medium Dun Grizzly Ewing Chickabou, short tuft
• Abdomen: Gray-brown dubbing, ribbed with copper wire
• Gills: Medium Dun Grizzly chickabou fibers, tied along both sides
• Thorax and legs: Dark dubbing, with chickabou fibers swept back as legs

Tying: Big drake nymphs have wide, waving gills. Tie a small chickabou clump on each side of the abdomen and trim it to stay inside the hook gap.

How to fish: Before a Green or Brown Drake hatch, dead-drift it near the bottom in soft water, then lift it slowly toward the surface. Drake nymphs swim up to hatch and trout follow them.