Al Troth’s adult caddis, and the most tied caddis dry in the world for good reason: it is simple, it floats, and its silhouette is the tented wing every adult caddis carries. Caddis live in every Australian trout stream and hatch through the warm months, so the fly earns its place from the Snowy Mountains rivers, where NSW DPIRD’s guide lists it in size 12 to 14 for both browns and rainbows, to the Victorian alps, the tableland streams of New England and the fast rivers of Tasmania’s north. Its hour is the evening, when the riffles start to boil.

From the bend forward: a slim body of dubbing, tan, olive or grey, running the length of the shank. A body hackle of brown or ginger rooster palmered forward through the dubbing in open turns and locked down with a fine wire rib. A wing of elk hair tied in at the head, lying flat over the body in a tent, its tips reaching the bend. The butts of the elk hair are trimmed short and left standing to form a flared head, which is what makes the fly skate.

A size fourteen deer-hair or CDC sedge is a useful indicator fly over a nymph on small Australian streams, buoyant enough to hold a weighted dropper while still drawing trout up on its own, and the Elk Hair Caddis is a Mitta Mitta fly-box staple.

Fish it in the riffles and the heads of runs, not the slow glides. Caddis hatch in moving water and the fish that eat them hold in it. A dead drift works; a skated drift often works better, because a real caddis skitters. Lift the rod tip and let the fly slide across the current a few inches, then drop it. The takes on a skating caddis are savage, so hold the rod lightly.

Dress it with floatant before the first cast and again after every fish. The elk hair wing is the float; once it is waterlogged the fly is a wet. By day, in broken water, it doubles as a searching dry and a dry-dropper top fly when a Stimulator feels too big. When fish are boiling at the caddis and refusing the dry, they are on the pupa under the film; a Klinkhammer is the next fly.