Orange Quill
A hot-orange quill body under a dun hackle, and one of the strangest facts in fly fishing: the blue-winged olive is not orange, the trout do not appear to think it is orange, and yet at dusk during a BWO hatch this fly outfishes any accurate imitation of the natural. Skues wrote it up at length and never entirely explained it either.
The last half-hour of a summer evening during a blue-winged olive hatch, when the light has gone flat and the accurate patterns have stopped working. Fish it upstream to a rising fish and expect the take to be confident.
The prevailing theory is that low evening light shifts the apparent colour of the natural’s translucent body toward orange. Whether or not that is the mechanism, the observation is a century old and holds.
