Olive Chickaboo Body Marabou Patch

Olive Ewing Chickabou Marabou Body Patch

Olive is the color of things that live in rivers. Sculpins, damsel nymphs, dragonfly nymphs, leeches, young-of-year trout, crawfish in weedy water — they’re all some shade of olive. If you fish moving water and don’t carry olive, you’re fishing with one hand.

Olive Ewing Chickabou is a true mid-olive, not too yellow, not too dark. It’s the tail on my everyday trout bugger and the whole body on a stillwater damsel. On smallmouth rivers, olive chickabou sculpins move fish that ignore every hard bait in the boat.

Trout, smallmouth, largemouth, carp, steelhead. Olive belongs in every box.

Recipe 1: Olive Chickabou Damsel Nymph

• Hook: 2XL nymph, #10–#12
• Bead: Gold or olive glass bead (optional)
• Thread: Olive 8/0
• Tail: Olive Ewing Chickabou, short tuft, half shank length
• Body: The same chickabou fibers twisted on the thread and wrapped thin
• Thorax: Olive Hare’s Ear dubbing
• Eyes: Small black bead-chain or mono eyes

Tying:

Use the short fibers from the tip of the patch. Twist them into a rope with the thread and wrap a slim, tapered abdomen. Keep the whole fly skinny — real damsel nymphs are pencil-thin.

How to fish:

In lakes from late spring through summer, fish it on a floating or intermediate line along weed edges. Retrieve with slow, 3-inch pulls and long pauses. Damsels swim with a side-to-side wiggle, and the chickabou does that for you.

Recipe 2: Olive Chickabou Sculpin

• Hook: 4XL streamer, #2–#6
• Weight: Coneheads or a sculpin helmet, plus 10 wraps lead-free wire
• Thread: Olive 140-denier
• Tail: Olive Ewing Chickabou, full plume
• Body: Olive Ice Dub, brushed out
• Pectoral fins: Two short chickabou tufts, one each side
• Head: Olive wool or deer hair, trimmed wide and flat

Tying:

Tie the two chickabou pectoral fins in at the front third, angled out like a sculpin’s fins. Keep the head wide and flat so the fly stays near the bottom.

How to fish:

Sculpins live on the bottom and don’t swim far. Use a sink-tip, dead-drift it through riffles, and add short, hard hops off the gravel. Big browns and smallmouth eat it when it settles after a hop