Post
by Old Hat » Fri Jul 16, 2010 10:56 am
Well, I came up with this pattern after moving to central Oregon where the streams are just full of all kinds of caddis. This particular pattern is for the Grannom caddis. I had been playing around with a lot of realistic style case caddis and heavy nymph style cased patterns. Never really had much luck with them. A few fish here and there. Then I came across a pattern in a magazine. This pattern was a weighted cased caddis pattern but had the impressionistic style that I attracted me. It had a beadhead with two black hackles for and aft of the thorax, bright green dubbing between and a black abdomen. I tied some up, but again just didn't do great with them. I read some LaFontaine at the time and he mentioned, as I was also seeing in the stream, how case caddis when dislodged float case up and struggle toward the bottom to grasp onto something. I was just getting into flymphs at the time, so the basic design of this came into being, flip the orientation and use the flymph style to build a case. It started with black hackle wound at the rear and a hackle palmered at the front like it is now. I liked the attractive properties of the movement of the hackle in the case area but I wanted a little more imitation of the caddis head area. The black dyed pheasant had a sheen and just the right properties for legs and the peacock for the head (well it's peacock, can't go wrong there). So after some tweaking around with proportions etc. This is what came about. I don't think most cased caddis are taken in the drift but rather plucked off the substrate and I don't think they are a first food choice for most fish. I have seen full stomachs of cased caddis though. Anyway, the materials do have a purpose at least in my mind. The pulsating attractive movement of the case hackle. The hotspot area coming out of the case ( I use mostly green, cream, orange). The struggling movement of the legs which is a different movement than the wound hackle, and again peacock (it's peacock). It's not a fly I fish often, to be honest, I just don't think fish feed often on the cased caddis, but sometimes it does the job when all others fail and I think I do have better response from this then any of the "dead in the water" weighted nymph patterns that are out there.
