Bodkin / Patterns

Green Drake

Dry Fly · Trout · Intermediate · 4 versions

Green Drake fly

Classic Recipe

  • Hook Standard dry fly, 2x long, 10-12
  • Thread Olive 6/0

Materials

  • Hackle Grizzly dyed olive hackle (2 feathers)
  • Tail Moose body hair (forked)
  • Body Olive dubbing (robust)
  • Rib Yellow thread or floss (4 inches)
  • Wing Elk or deer hair (upright)

How to tie it

  1. Mount the 2x long hook, lay a thread base.
  2. Tie in a forked moose hair tail, split the fibers into two bunches with figure-8 wraps. Drakes are big mayflies; the tail should be a good shank length.
  3. Tie in the yellow floss rib at the bend.
  4. Dub a robust olive body forward to the 65% mark, fuller than your usual mayfly, with a real taper.
  5. Spiral the yellow rib forward in 4-5 evenly spaced turns. That yellow-over-olive segmentation is a signature of the natural.
  6. Stack and tie in an upright elk hair wing, one shank length tall.
  7. Wrap two olive-dyed grizzly hackles behind and in front of the wing, packed reasonably dense. This fly needs to float a big body.
  8. Whip finish, cement.

Substitutions

  • Body instead of Olive dubbing: Olive Superfine — Clean dubbing for the big body; Olive/yellow blended dubbing — Yellowish olive match
  • Tail instead of Moose body hair: Brown bucktail — Similar stiffness; Micro Fibbets — Precise split, durable
  • Wing instead of Elk or deer hair: Coastal deer hair — More buoyant for this big fly; Dyed olive deer hair — Matches the overall green tone

Other versions

3 more in the app: Gregg Dressing (1940), Fly Fish Food Tie, Jigged.

Tying videos

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