How to Tie the Peacock Caddis Dry Fly

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

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This fly was created by a fellow named Jim Bonnett from Montana I believe during the 1980's. It's a great general caddis dry fly pattern. It fishes really well and it's easy and quick to tie. It's typically tied in sizes 12 -18.

Material List:

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• Hook: TMC 100 size 14
• Thread: Veevus GSP 50D in Black
• Body: Peacock Herl
• Wing: Hareline Deer Hair or Elk Hair
• Hackle: Whiting Dry Fly Cape Brown and Grizzly

Video Transcript

Hello, I'm Carl at Trident Fly Fishing. Today we're going to tie the Peacock Caddis. This fly was created by a fellow named Jim Bonnett from Montana, and I believe that was during the 1980s. It's a great general caddis dry fly pattern. It's really easy to tie, it fishes well, and it's typically tied in sizes 12 through 18. Here's the completed fly in the vise.

The hook we're going to put in the vise today is a TMC 100BL - that's their barbless version of their 100. The thread we're going to use today is Veevus GSP 50D in black. We'll start this thread about an eye length or two behind the eye, then run it back to where the barb of the hook would have been.

The first material we're going to tie in is going to be peacock herl. We'll pick some off from up near the eye and tie this in. Run our thread back up to about two eye lengths from the hook eye, and gently wrap the herl forward. Once we reach about the two eye length point, we're going to tie this off and cut our excess.

We'll tie our wing in next, which will be some deer hair in a natural color. We'll clip a bit from the hide that's about a third of a pencil width in diameter. This is not a very big wing. We'll strip out all of the fuzz and underfur, get it in our stacker, and get the tips evened up. We want this wing to be just a little bit longer than the bend of the hook. We'll measure that out and transfer it. Now we're going to cut some of that material away, just so we have less to deal with when we tie it in.

You'll want to run your thread through all of that material, all the way up to the eye - that will keep it from spinning. If you've done it right, it's all going to be right up on top. Now we want to get rid of all of that excess hair, and we're going to wrap back to the base of the wing. We want this wing to lay down on top instead of being flared out like a regular caddisfly. As we come back, we'll take some nice loose wraps, and that should lay the wing down like that. If you've got some fibers that have slipped down, we can just snip those out so you can see more of that peacock herl. Neaten this up.

The last material we're going to tie in is going to be our hackle. This is a furnace and grizzly feather, sized to the hook. We're going to tie these in together. To prepare them, we're going to snip some barbules off either side of the stem. We're going to tie these feathers in with the shiny side facing towards us. We'll capture those and wrap back to the eye, tying them in one at a time - though you can tie them in together if you wish. This is a fairly heavily hackled fly. When we reach the eye, we'll tie that off and cut off our excess.

Take the grizzly and bring that forward, working through the brown. When we reach the eye, we'll capture that, tie it off, and cut off our excess. Form a small head, then use the whip finish tool to make a four or five turn whip finish. Seat the knot and cut our thread. Add a little head cement to finish it off - this is Loon's water-based, soaks in really well. And we have our completed fly.

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