Wet olives

I tied up a batch of Wet Olive variants for a friend back in Ireland. I mostly tied a Mallard and Green-Olive variant - as featured in the corner of the photo. We were fishing on a lough in Country Monaghan together when he spotted this in my wet fly box and nabed this without any heistation. This caught him some good fish recently. Indeed, I can see this being a very useful mid dropper, particulary when Olive buzzers are hatching. I like the way the Pearl mylar assumes a green hue when tied over the olive silk - which contrasts effectively with the dyed orange tippets.

The tying session gave me an opportunity to use a cape that I had recently dyed. It is a gorgeous dark olive, to my eyes anyhow. I had this lovely Metz grade II furnace saddle, which although very useful, I could not resist dying over this with veniards olive dun dye to produce a dark or even sooty olive. I appreciate that dyeing good saddle capes should not be taken lightly, especially their price these days. Yet dyeing a furnace or nautral red with an olive dye is a fairly safe enough affair.  By having given this a good pre-wash cleasning with Veniards venepol detergent, I left this in the dye bath for good five minutes. The two darkish olive wets on the left on the photo include hackles from the new cape.