How to Tie the Grannom Caddis Dry Fly

Learn how to tie the Grannom Caddis Dry Fly pattern, including step-by-step instructions, a video tutorial, pictures, and much more. Improve your fly-tying skills here.

Trident Fly Fishing is a full-service fly shop. We spend a lot of time testing gear and writing reviews to give you all of the tools to make your next trip a success. We are not a blog or a review site. 100% of our funding comes from your gear purchases, so if this blog post helps you on your next fly fishing adventure, please support us by buying your gear from us

The Grannom Caddis are one of the early caddis hatches here in the East. It's simple to tie and a lot of fun to fish during the hatch. This is the female version. If you wish to tie the male version just omit the green tag which represents the egg sack.

Material List

• Hook: TMC 100 BL in size 14
• Thread: Veevus 14/0 Fly Tying Thread in Brown
• Tag: UTC single strand floss in Green
• Body: Superfine Dubbing in Olive Brown
• Under wing: Antron Yard in Cream
• Wing: Hareline Deer Hair

We've put together a kit that contains all the materials you need to tie this exact fly pattern.

Click the button below to shop the selection.

Video Transcript

Hello, I'm Carl at Trident Fly Fishing. Today we're going to be tying the Grannom Caddis. This is a female dry fly version. The Grannom Caddis are one of the early caddis hatches here in the east. It's a really simple tie and it's a lot of fun to fish when the hatch is on.

Here's the fly in the vise. The hook we'll be using today is a TMC 100BL - that's a barbless version of their standard dry fly hook. Our thread is going to be some Semperfli Nano Silk in 30D. We'll get this started about hook eye length behind the eye and run this back about halfway to start to form a thread base, then back up.

The first material we're going to tie in is going to be some Uni Floss. It's a single ply in green. This is going to represent the egg sac. If you wish to tie the male version of this fly, just eliminate this step. I also believe the male fly is a little bit smaller, so maybe you want to jump this down to a size 16 hook for the male.

We're going to double our floss up and tie this in right on top of the hook. Run this all the way back to where the barb would be, or the start of the bend of the hook, and we'll leave one strand behind. Then we'll take one strand and form our egg sac by making four or five turns back, and then some turns back up to where we started. Capture our floss, bring our second strand back up over the top - that will prevent the floss from sliding down the back of the hook. Run our thread back up to our starting point just to give ourselves an even body. Cut off our excess floss.

Run our thread back to the start of the egg sac, where we're going to tie in our body. That is some Superfine Dubbing, and the color is brown olive. Create a nice thin noodle here on our thread.

Now we're going to tie in the underwing. This is just some simple Antron yarn. This will add a little bit of movement to the fly and just a little bit of sparkle. Cut off our excess here and neaten that up a bit. We want this wing to be just a little bit longer than the length of the hook, so right behind the bend of the hook we'll cut that off. Push down on it with your thumb - that will kind of fan it out.

And lastly, we'll tie in our wing. That's going to be some deer hair. It's not a big fly, so you don't need too much. We've got a small clump of deer hair that we have just cut from the hide, and we're stripping out all the fuzzies. This hair seems to have an awful lot of underfur, so it doesn't stack as well as some. Seems to help though if I use a bigger stacker.

Once we've got our clump established, we're going to measure this out against the hook. We want it to be about the same length as our underwing, maybe a tad longer. I like a bullet head on my flies versus the flat head you see on a lot of caddis flies. We're going to measure that out just to the eye of the hook, take a couple of turns, and then pull tight. Hanging on to the deer hair, it'll stay right on top. Advance our thread up to the eye, a few turns to lock everything in.

Take our whip finish tool, a four or five turn whip finish, and cut our thread. If we've done everything right, everything will have stayed on top, and when you look underneath the fly you'll be able to see what the fish would see. A little head cement - this is Loon's water-based, soaks in really well. Flip, clear the eye out, and our fly's complete.

Please feel free to add comments at the bottom of the page. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button to continue to view all the new content here at Trident Fly Fishing. Thanks for watching, I hope to see you again next time.