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The Yellow-Bellied Olive

The Yellow-Bellied Olive is a dry fly designed to simulate the various mayflies commonly called Blue-Winged Olives. Jake Crockett took a sampling of Yellow-Bellied Olives out West this past August and one of them took the only trout he caught on a dry fly.

Not that Jake caught only one trout; however, the others came from down deep, taken on nymphs and streamers. Now, I'm not necessarily a "purist" and neither is Jake but if you give the matter some serious thought you ought to conclude that fishing for trout with lead-weighted nymphs is not much more than a cut or so above dredging for bullheads with a treble hook and a gob of worms.

Which leads some of us to conclude that if you can take any trout with a dry fly, you should, simply because it's a good thing to do. Which is why Jake was whipping the water to a froth with a dry fly despite the fact that an early blizzard had driven just about every trout in Montana to the bottom. He likes to call this "perseverance." You may have another name for it.

The Yellow-Bellied Olive is a standard Catskill-type dry fly based on the supposition that a trout, if it can see the color of a floating bug, sees the bottom color. This rather simple idea seems to have escaped the original inventor of the Blue-Winged Olive fly. The olive color is on the back of the natural fly - the part we see when we look down.

The standard Blue-Winged Olive usually catches fish just fine. I am convinced that this is so because the trout ordinarily does not see the color of the hatching fly or the imitation; it sees only its size, shape, and "light" or "dark" tone. Against any degree of bright sky, in particular, it is doubtful that the trout sees the insect's body as anything but a dark, backlighted shape.

In certain conditions -- overcast; rainy; early Montana blizzard; etc. -- the color of the fly may be visible, particularly if the conditions keep it floating bellied in the surface film. Thus the usefulness of the Yellow-Bellied Olive.

The Blue-Winged Olive mayflies almost invariably have a yellowish color on the underside. Thus, the following formula: wing: woodduck flank; tail fibers and hackle: medium dun; body: yellow rabbit fur; thread: olive-brown. Hook sizes are 16 through 20.

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Originally published in the Clinch Valley Conservationist, Autumn 1993