Tuesday Ties - $3 Dip

Caddis are probably the most abundant trout food around. Mayflies steal the spotlight most of the time because it’s easier to differentiate between species and they are more elegant to look at. However, in terms of sheer biomass Caddis take to cake. The best part is caddis imitations are overall easier to tie than mayfly imitations. The $3 Dip is perhaps the easiest, yet one the more effective subsurface caddis patterns around and it originated right here in Southwest Montana!

Receipe
Hook: Your favorite scud hook. Usually 16-22
Bead: Gold looks good on most color variations
Body: Tying thread
Rib: Ultra Wire in appropriate sizes
Wing: Lighter colored deer or elk hair

Start out by securing the wire down to whole length of the hook shank. Next using just the tying thread make a tapered body that isn’t too thick and make sure to fill in behind the bead. When I am tapering my $3 Dip bodies I like to think of the shank length in thirds, but everybody will develop their own system.

Now take to wire and make 5 or 6 wraps up the length of the body. The quality of deer hair you use on this fly isn’t super important. You don’t want to use brittle fibers, but there isn’t a special $3 Dip hair. This fly is a good way of using up older hair. Take a small chunk of hair and groom it into tying condition. You want all the shorter fibers and under-fluff gone. Simply tie in the hair right on top parallel with the shank. At this point you can tie the fly off which is what I did in this picture. You want to wipe finish the fly right behind the bead and in front of all the deer hair.

Nearly done, we just need a little trimming and maybe a dab of cement. You’ll notice that the hair in the two bunches, front and back, which are separated by the thread wraps. Trim the front bunch fairly close to the body, but the back one you want to extend approximately a third the length down the body. Done!

Good colors include: olive, brown, red and black.