Taped Up

I think it was Ollie Edwards who came up with this nifty way of simplifying the old feather and cement and later feather and tape winged caddis flies. The method handily addresses the issues that these patterns had while also making them quicker to tie. A win-win in my book.  

 

The original cement & feather jobs look great, but unfortunately the quickly lose their shape while fishing, a fish or 2 and you might as well have gone with a bunch of feather fibres. Plus the original method involved an embroidery hoop, a pair of tights and the hassle of cementing feathers onto the tights before cutting them out and shaping them. Who can be bothered with that? 

 

Then someone clever decided to just stick a feather to some Scotch tape and trim it.  Good. A definite improvement, but the feather doesn't take very long to separate from the tape after making contact with water. Not a huge problem but the flappy noise of the feather and tape fluttering together can sound like there is a bit of leaf on the fly, so you pull the feather out. This makes the sticking of the feather a waste of time and a feather that could have been a nice hackle.

 

The tape is great, it's light and durable and offers an excellent semi translucent impression of a caddis wing. Unfortunately without a feather it'll stick to itself when you try to fold it, which is where Ollie's method comes in.  All you have to do is press a bit of dubbing onto the sticky side of the tape, then fold and cut it to shape, it's quicker than preparing and sticking a feather, it also covers the whole surface of the tape so there's no worry about sticking bits together and wasting a wing. It doesn't matter that you lose the dubbing while fishing, it's done it's job. You're left with a fishing fly that you don't need to start pulling things out of.

 

Here's the pattern 

Hook:Dry fly of your choice, probably sizes 16-8, depending on the brand. It gets a bit fiddly if you go smaller, but is possible.