Par for the course it was another windy spring day on the river. There were sporadic rises but nothing too constant. Any bugs hatching would be immediately blown off the water. I decided to stick to an old standby rig for this time of year, a skwala adult pattern with a midge pupa dropper. The flies I filled that formula with though were a little different than I normally use. I went with a foam hopper pattern that used black foam and for my dropper used a RK Emerger rather than my standard Zebra Midge. I wanted a fly that would keep a float despite being swamped by the waves the wind was kicking up on the river so that was my reasoning for choosing the foam pattern. Another new thing I tried where some tapered leaders that I made by a method I saw a video on late last week and twisted some up over the weekend. I liked how well the leaders turned over the big foam fly even in a strong wind. I still struggled placing the fly exactly where I wanted it with the wind blowing so hard. Finally I moved downstream to a favorite big eddy where there are always plenty of feeding fish. Sure enough I found a big female willing to eat the big foam bug, and she immediately took a big run peeling some line off my reel. She turned out to be the longest fish I have caught this spring up there, a solid 22 inch fish. She put up an outstanding fight as well. Another awesome day on the water.
April 9
I fished a different area that I haven't fished yet this year but where I had a few good days last year. The water moves pretty slow here and I have found that the fishing can be great if they are visibility feeding on the surface but if they aren't showing themselves there is an awful lot of water you would have to cover. It helps to know just where the fish are instead of hoping in this vast slow run that your fly will just happen to end up in front of a fish. I stopped in just to see if any noses were up and sure enough I spotted some rises along the far side.
Now the last couple weeks I have gotten away from my favorite dry fly pattern for this river and been trying to branch out and try some new things. It turns out most of those experiments hadn't yielded much. Today I decided it was time to go back to old reliable. It is a Biot body, CDC Sparkle Dun, but I use a few strands of Brown CDC fibers for the tail shuck instead of Z-lon. Pretty basic, but when BWO's are out I have not often had this one fail me.
The hardest part of fishing these fish was anticipating which way they were moving around the pool after seeing a rise. They were cruising. I finally got my cast in front of a fish I could see moving around the run and sure enough it took the little fly, but I busted the tippet on the hook set. It's been a while since I did that. At least I knew this fly was working. I tied on a new length of tippet and a new fly and made another attempt. I focused on a fish that was cruising closer to the bank that was working the water there pretty good. Again it took a couple tries before I got the movements of the fish pegged and the fly in it's path. This time when the big nose slurped the fly it stuck and the tippet held. The fish bolted and I wondered how many feeding fish it spooked out of the hole but I wasn't too concerned. After landing this one I was heading back to the office anyway. Another nice lunch hour fish. No pics of this one though. He took the fly a little deep in his mouth and required the forceps to reach in and get the fly. I figured he had been through enough and revived and sent him on his way without subjecting him to a photo op.
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