Gary LaFontaine once wrote that the angling convention of “rocket emergence” for caddis is an exaggeration — that caddis hesitate in and under the film, and trout feed heavily on forms nearly invisible to the angler. That observation, tucked inside decades of caddis entomology, is the real case for building your May caddis box around three patterns. Not because three is a magic number, but because caddis feeding divides easily into three windows, with a named pattern for each.

The three are the Elk Hair Caddis, the X-Caddis, and the CDC & Elk. Each came from a specific tier solving a specific problem. Together they handle high-riding adults on fast water, emergers struggling in the film, and the low-profile silhouette that pressured trout demand. Tie them in the right sizes and colors for your home water and you can ignore most of what’s pinned to a shop wall in May.