Blue Upright
A stripped peacock quill body — taken from the eye of the tail feather, so it carries its own natural barring — under a medium blue dun cock hackle, with blue dun fibres for the tail. Devon's answer to the olives, and one of those West Country patterns that quietly turns out to work everywhere. The quill body is the whole point: it segments like a real abdomen and translucent-lights the way dubbing never does.
Any olive hatch from spring through autumn, and as a searching fly over broken water when nothing is showing. It rides well in a riffle, which is where it was designed to fish.
The barred quill reads as segmentation at a glance, and blue dun hackle against the light is very close to the wing colour of the naturals it answers. It is suggestive rather than exact, which is why it covers several species of olive instead of one.
