Let Them Eat Caddis

I was between my daughter's early morning soccer match (she won) and the first tennis game of the year against my wife (she won) when JP pulled up to the driveway.  Within 7 minutes we decided that we were going fishing, where we were going and what time I'd pick him up.

I was still licking my wounds and swallowing my pride from the courtside beatdown as I hitched up the boat, grabbed the 6wt and my camera and drove to JP's.

He was ready.  Two-point-something miles later we backed the trailer down the launch.  (You know what is a highly under-rated sound?  Crunching gravel.)  It's quick when it's simple and we were idling down the river in just about no time.

We anchored off some downed timber hoping that the crappies or gills might be there, waiting for a fly to drop on their heads.  If they were there, they gave us no indication.

I felt a little bad suggesting carp next...for two reasons.  First, JP had elected to string up his 4wt instead of his 8wt and second, JP has not been as eager (historically speaking) to chase carp as I have.

But we went after carp anyway.  That's a fringe benefit of having the tiller in your hand.

We started blowing up fish muds as soon as the channel widened and the water got shallow.  I cut the motor and we drifted into a glassy stretch with a small creek flowing in.  I took the stripping bucket up on the stern seat and JP prepped his gear from the casting deck.

Visibility had improved nicely since my last trip on the river and we saw a good number of carp cruising along the sand flats as well as entering and exiting the creek.  Cruising fish are usually tough to feed and these were no exception.  The wind kicked up a little and we decided to row back upstream and stake out over a light patch of sand that would give us a decent view.  We repeated the performance of not getting any fish to pay attention to our flies.

I figured we might as well shoot down to the mud flats and stake out as this would give us 360 degrees of fishing opportunity.  So we did.  We eased into my normal anchoring spot, adjacent a powerline and near a bowl on the flat that I know fish like to hang out in.  An osprey flew by with it's fish dinner clutched in its talons and turned head first into the wind...as they will do to reduce flight drag.

It didn't take long to notice light swirls and bubbles just off the powerline rock pile.  It also didn't take long to realize that the wind and current were channeling floating midges right about where the carps lips were showing themselves.  With lateral lines like the best sonar and radar combo never devised by mankind, I knew that stealth was needed if we were going to get a shot.  I asked JP to lift the bow anchor off the bottom manually and not run it through the pulley as I rowed us into position.  We crept into casting range and I saw another fish tip up and slurp a bug off the top.  JP slid the anchor onto the bottom.  Took up his position and started casting.

I snapped a few pics and then rummaged in my box for a small midgelike dry fly.  I was happy that I had left the trout boxes in my gear bag and opted for a size 16 elk hair caddis similar to the one JP was floating over the noses.  I was on the 3rd or 4th turn in my improved clinch knot when JP said something that sounded like a combination laugh/profanity, laced with a side helping of surprise and victory.

When I looked up his 4wt was bent deep.

It took a while.  We pulled the anchors and drifted the fish off the rock pile, I reset the stern anchor as JP laughed and took in line, giggled and feathered the drag beautifully.  10 or 15 minutes of bulldogging later I reached in and pulled JP's carp out of the water and parked it on the deck.

Size 16 elk hair caddis, 4wt, surface feeding carp.
I asked JP how he felt about carp now and he said, "Yeah".

BWO's

At 4:00 am my alarm screamed.  When I set it 3 hours earlier I considered what 3 hours of sleep feels like and gave myself the option to disregard the buzzer and go back to sleep.  With the switch set back to "more sleep",  I put my head on my pillow and thought about it for 2 minutes and then hit the shower.   By 5:00 I was parked by the stream and sliding on my waders, 16 ounces of gas-station coffee coursing through my veins and having the desired effect.

The low areas of the valley were shrouded in layers of fog that made for a surreal landscape to go trout fishing in.  The plan was to nymph up some brown trout in the morning and then paste some hoppers once the sun came up, burned off the haze and got the world buzzing.  That was the plan.

I botched the first fish after dredging with a zebra midge for 30 minutes.  The line paused and I pulled with the kind of effort that is required to pull a fly off of a rock or weed on the bottom.  I felt the tell-tale tug-tug of a fish and realized only after the line went slack that I had broken a cardinal nymphing rule.  The next fish came 20 minutes later, a smallish 8" fish that got the hook caught under it's belly.  I am not a fish counter, but even so, this fish didn't count. 

By 7:30 I was back on the road trying to decide what was next.  I was thinking about smallmouth and how they crash baitfish and bonefish chasing down and inhaling shrimp flies.  I was thinking about how little trout fishing I do these days and how, at the moment, I was tired and feeling pretty uninspired.  Considering that I had a day to fish, a beautiful stream in front of me a car-load of rods and flies and a perfectly beautiful August day...I started to feel like a spoiled ass.

I pulled off on a side road that leads to a not so secret spot on this not secret trout stream.  Leaving my rod in the car I carried the last few sips of my cold gas station coffee to the bridge and stood staring into the current.  There I made up my mind to not be such an ass.

I fished the bridge pool with a nymph, deep and slow.  Paying attention and mending my line often.  I once hooked and landed an 18" brown here among the discarded worm containers and recall feeling pretty smug about it.  The same outcome would be welcome today, but despite my renewed enthusiasm, nothing happened.  I noticed a half dozen Blue Winged Olive mayflies circling in the eddy by my feet and when I waded back to shore I stopped to photograph a spider's web containing a few that had become ensnared.

The lush aquatic vegetation made the nymphing upstream tricky.  Short lanes of clear deep water ran between the mats of green and tried my best to drift my fly down these lanes in hopes that the trout would shoot out from under their summer cover and take a bite.  Even the deep corners, where the deep water ran easy against the bank and the drifts were long, left me blank. 

There was a moment when I thought, "I have become a perfectly shitty trout fisherman".

A rise form against the bank made me look up from tying on the foam terrestrial.  I finished the knot, aired out some line and dropped it 3 feet upstream from the commotion.  A trout smacked it but the hook failed to stick.  Finally...something.   I stayed with the terrestrial for the next few bends and hooked but failed to land a nice fish that had risen mid-stream.   In the run above that fish's lie, another fish rose and then another...

Either the hatch had just started or I had just started to pay attention.  In the run above me, the little Blue Winged Olives that I had seen downstream in the eddy and in the spider web were popping up , floating down and taking flight.  The foam fly found it's way back in it's box and 36" of 6x tippet was married, via bloodknot, to my leader.   To the business end I attached a size 18 parachute style BWO with a light gray turkey flat post and dun hackle.  This was to be the last fly I tied on today.

What happened next can be described as trout fishing nirvana.  A fish rose and after three drifts ate my dry fly.  The next fish ate as well but the hook popped as I set.  With the sun high, I could see the fish had gone back to finning in it's holding spot in front of a midstrem rock.  For thirty minutes I worked it, getting flat out refusals and inspection rises until finally everything fell into place and it tipped up and ate again.  This time the hook stuck. 

As one fish was landed and released, another fish, a few feet upstream from the last started rising.   It was 3 hours and 200 yards of the stream...fish after fish.  At 2:00 in the afternoon and I was nearing the end of things.  I had caught and released every rising fish that I saw.  From thoughts of being a shitty fisherman to this...all in the same day. 

The last fish rose under the branches of a bush and having batted 1000 I confidently made the 40' cast...as with all of the others, the trout tipped up and ate.   I set the hook and could see the trout's head turn toward me, the white of it's open mouth visible as the fly popped out. 

For what seemed like 5 minutes I stood there thinking about the success of the morning and the lesson this last fish taught me on the importance of humility and the concept of having enough.

And then the same fish rose again...so I cast my size 18 parachute BWO back in and I caught him too. 

  

And then...there they were.

Back to the local beat watching and waiting for the white bass and walleyes to converge on the incredible midge hatch that has been occurring the past few nights.  I came early and picked off a few small gills that were dimpling before wading back to the hot-zone.

It started, as all great hatches do, with a few here and there.  The early hatching midges typically have the benefit of escaping snapping fish jaws only to flutter into a snapping beak.  The rises started early as well...fish leaving the safety of the deep to venture into the shallows to intercept these bugs as they struggle to mature, grow wings and take flight.

The size 12 split wing elk hair caddis that I tied up today with the wing tied half length seemed like the right choice so I tied one on and sent it out.  A few small whities and a little small mouth bass inhaled it before too long.  The number of bugs was increasing and I felt my odds were going down trying to match the hatch so I switched over to a small (sz 10) white gurgler and pasted it into the dissipating rings of rising fish.

Twitch, twitch, POW!

When the topwater bite slowed down, I went to another new fly which is now named the "White Dart".  With a size 6 Mustad 9672 as the iron and the tail tied short, the normally short-striking white bass got a mouthful.

By 10:00 it was all over.   A pile of fish were hooked and landed in the short hour and a half window that seemed, in the darkness, like a half of a day.

I reeled up and went home.

Midge

It would be neat to call this picture "Sunfish" except it's a Bluegill.

1 of many - White Bass

Channeling Sylvester Nemes

As will eventually happen around here, spring arrives.  And it did...just yesterday.   Sensing that 72 degrees and sunshine in April means the best hatch (in my opinion) of the year on the local trout stream, I made arrangements to get up and get after it.  Fish that like caddis flies also like swung soft hackles, a tip taught to me originally by none other than Shox McSteel, back in the days before children and mortgages.  It was also reinforced by a brilliant though highly underrated angler named Sylvester Nemes who wrote the book on this fly and the techniques used to fish it.
The swung fly has become the hip thing to do in some steelhead circles these days but I will take this opportunity to suggest that it is also a very, very deadly approach to spring creek brown trout fishing.  If you ever tire of bobbers and lead and there isn't enough surface activity to warrant the Halfordian approach...tie on a brace of size 16 soft hackles and swing through.  You may be surprised.

The cardinals sang and the midges flew, the sun rose and the morning clouds burned off as I took 2/3 swings per step through all the choice water and even some marginal water.  The browns were awake and looking up and they plucked away at my Hungarian partridge wrapped iron.   A few came up short, but more than my share stuck.  Nothing big, nothing worthy of a real grip and grin, but the catching was hot and the fish continued to peel off their feeding lanes to have a taste.

After fishing my favorite caddis riffle (without ever seeing even a single caddis...or caring) I noticed a fish rising on the outside of a deep slow bend.  Telltale ripples exposed his position every 10-20 seconds as it tilted up for a midge struggling to dry itself before flight.  Leaning my 4 wt. against a box elder tree, I got down in the dirt and dry grass and slithered to the edge of the bank for a closer look.  Less than ten feet away I could make out the spots of a healthy brown trout, high in the water column, having breakfast...or brunch perhaps.  Making myself as comfortable as possible as the blood rushed downhill into my head I watched and snapped pictures for the better part of an hour.  The sun was completely wrong and the light reflection was brutal, but I had front row seats and enjoyed the show until the fish spooked and disappeared...sunlight glinting off the lens perhaps?

I checked my watch and saw that mid-day was fast approaching so I made for my vehicle in order to make my an appointment with my daughter and her soccer team.   I made it to the appointment and even had enough extra time to stop at a local coffee house to bring my wife a small token of my appreciation for mornings like these.  I should confess that as I headed for the vehicle I couldn't help but stop at my favorite caddis riffle and work through it one last time just to cement my satiation.  The fish were still eager and a few larger ones came out to interrupt the easy rhythms of my soft hackle swinging through...Just like Sylvester Nemes suggested they might. 

The day about to unfold.

That's gotta suck.

Soft hackle brunch

Average brown for the morning

A quick pic before release

Add caption

Midge on the menu

Gulp

...and turn

Gulp

...and turn...

...and turn.

Gulp

...and turn

Almost Vertical

The finest background music

Spring Creek Fix

After the chores were done (or at least to the point where my sense of responsibility tapered off) I grabbed the 4 and a box of ants, beetles etc and made my way creekside.  A 2.5 hour wade through gin clear spring creek from 2:30 pm to 5pm...the light was just right and I could see them fully illuminated...tilting and sipping.  A size 18 black ant on 6x and they rarely refused.  No giants these, but the view was incredible.

April Again

One of the finer months, April.
Mostly sunny day, 58 degrees,
Light breeze.
4 wt, hippers, 6x, elk hair caddis.

I went to see if the caddis were hatching and making the trout show.  They were and they were.