WATER

EARLY A.M. –I’m supposed to meet my pals from the Michigan Fly Fishers Club on the South Platte River this morning, but I took a rain check. If you live in Colorado you’ll understand the irony. It’s been a tough and deadly week in terms of water. There’s been too much of it for too long and heavy rain is in the weather forecast again for later today. Still, it’s nice outside right now. A partly cloudy sky that’s red with the sunrise. I go back inside and turn the TV on to take a final look at our new oracle---the high resolution weather radar that the TV meteorologists call NEXRAD. It says I should stay home, but I know the skies could be clear up on the river…

12 NOON & LATER. It’s all thunder and lightning now. I’m sitting at the fly tying bench trying to dream up a diversion to get my mind off the water. I’m a trout fisherman. How can I not like the water? Well, I don’t today. With luck I’ll get a fly tied. 

IT JUST WORKS

It’s cloudy, rainy and finally cooling down. Needless to say, I have Blue-winged Olives on my mind. If it wasn’t raining so hard I’d be on the river. I’m at home right now checking my fly boxes to make sure I have Blue-winged Olive spent spinner imitations and it isn’t because I expect to see an “olive” spinner fall. I don’t know when the spinner fall happens on the rivers I fish, but it isn’t when I’m there.  And I fish the September/October Blue-wing Olive hatches a lot.

You can blame Mike Clark for my fixation on the spent spinner imitations even though I never see a spinner fall. We were fishing to a very difficult hatch of olives on the Frying Pan River. About when I’d gone through every BWO imitation I had in my fly box Mike started catching trout right and left. I couldn’t stand it and asked what he was using.

“A Blue-winged Olive spent spinner. I always go to the spent spinner when nothing else works,” Mike said.

So there you have it. He’s right, too. The spent spinner works when your emerger and dun imitations which actually match what you’re seeing on the water don’t. It seems to defy common match-the-hatch logic. But don’t get me going on possible scientific explanations and there are plenty of them. It just works. Save it as the secret weapon for those times when you really need it. Don’t deplete the juju…..

FINISHING ON THREE STRINGS...

It’s early Sunday morning. I’m on the South Platte River tailwater below Spinney Mountain Reservoir, AKA the Dream Stream, in South Park, Colorado. The trico mating swarms overhead are as heavy as I’ve seen in a long time. Several small trout are already rising to either the last of the duns or the first of the spent spinners.

The one problem is that I left my trico fly box in the truck. I didn’t leave it there by design as part of the minimalist fly fishing kick I’ve been on lately. I just spaced it out. Anyway, the truck is a 15 minute walk away. I know I should hustle back up to it and get the fly box, but I decide against it over the objections of my logical, scientific mind. I’ll be heroic and fish the fly imitations I have with me. Almost on cue a size 24 trico spinner descends from the mating swarm and lands on my hand. The trouble is I don’t know if that’s a good or bad omen.

I have this idea that I can modify something in my fly box to make it work. It’s not on the same order as that story you hear about the great violinist who breaks a string during a performance and finishes his solo using the three strings he has left, but somehow this challenge has inspired me.

The closest imitation to a trico I can find in my fly box looks something like an RS-2 nymph. It’s small, dark and tied sparse. It could pass for a trico dun that lies stillborn or crippled on the water’s surface or a spent trico spinner that has crashed into the water and ripped its wings off. I rumple up the little stump of a wing on the fly to enhance the deception. A few minutes later I’m busy casting it to dimpling trout and manage to land a 3-inch rainbow trout and then another and another. They must be stocked “sub-catchables”.  I’ve caught little bitty trout on spent trico spinner imitations before in September, but at least they were 3-inch long young-of-the-year wild brown trout. It looks like the curse of the small fly strikes again! Even if there are a few larger trout, I can’t get through the little guys to catch them.

Later on, farther upstream, I do catch a few somewhat larger specimens. Still, this isn’t exactly like finishing the violin solo using the three remaining strings on the instrument. But it is a start. And if you think about it, the ability to pull off the fly fishing equivalent of finishing the solo on three-strings is the kind of fly fishing artistry we all dream about.

Buoyant, Visible, Durable

The high country trout you find in more remote locations aren’t usually picky eaters. You can over think the ins and outs of whether to imitate anything in particular, but the bottom line is you’re going to need a dry fly pattern that’s buoyant, visible and durable. That sounds easy enough. In practice it isn’t. The streams you encounter in the Rocky Mountain high country often stair step down through moderate to high gradients under the closed canopy of subalpine forests. That means on a good day you get a splotchy mishmash of light and shadow on the water. Riffles add more confusion. On a cloudy day the water’s surface turns to flat chrome gray.

The challenge is to tie a dry fly that stands up to all of this and for the sake of artistry let’s say we’ll tie it with all natural or predominately natural materials. So what works for a size 16 to size 12 hooks? The first thought to come my mind is maybe an H & L Variant (Eisenhower’s favorite) or maybe Fran Better’s “Usual” or John Gierach’s variation of the Hare’s Ear parachute. All good stuff.

Here’s some design considerations. Do you go with a heavy parachute hackle and highly visible post or a heavy traditional hackle and highly visible split-wings? What’s the best wing material? Which hackle style is most buoyant? What materials make the fly durable? Durability is a tough order. The dry fly will end up swinging underwater like a wet fly about half the time no matter what you do, get stuck in trees, get stuck in underwater logs and brush, and get gooey when you remove it from trout before releasing them….and on top of all that the forest isn’t going to allow you to false cast it dry anywhere near as much as you’d like.

I’m going to the fly tying vise now to mess around with all of this. So what’s the point? I like the idea of going to the high country with just seven or eight flies in my fly box.

Think lightness. 

VOICES FROM THE RIFFLES

The best place to begin this is at the end. I’m standing on a decidedly four-wheel drive, high-clearance vehicle road trying to figure out my fishing pals’ location. John, Paul and I have been leapfrogging each other as we fished our way up a high country stream.

Right now the subalpine forest is still dripping from a thunderstorm that ended a few hours ago. I can hear the stream rushing, gurgling and churning its way across and down the contours. I’m not sure if John and Paul were upstream from me or downstream or both, but I think I hear voices. Of course it could just the sounds of the water. I’ve heard voices coming from the riffles before. In fact, I’ve been so convinced a few times that I turned to look behind me to see if anyone was there. They weren’t.

But this time I act on the voices and head down through a boggy meadow full of moose turds to the creek. John and Paul are standing there. “So there you are,” says one of them.

Yesterday we pounded up this same 4WD road in John’s Jeep, jointed our fly rods together and headed down to the creek right as it started raining. We huddled under a subalpine fir figuring it would blow over in a bit, but it only intensified. There were waves of hail, thunder, lightning and heavy rain. After more than an hour freezing in our rain jackets and lightweight minimalist wet wading stuff we joked about who would go hypothermic first and then decided it was time to head back to the Jeep. Upon arrival we heaped our stuff in a pile, jumped inside and cranked on the heater. We then ate our sandwiches for the calories, babbled about never seeing it rain like this and watched over the creek which was now muddy and high and unfishable.

A day before that John and I fished a lower part of the same drainage. We reasoned we could go light and left our raingear in the truck. It rained hard enough for us to end up looking like two shivering, close-to-drowned rats. But we’d landed a few trout and in the process alleviated our discomfort.

Maybe the point to this is that every fishing trip isn’t about catching. Some are clearly about the power of the high country weather, autumn coming on, the understanding of how short the fishing season is and listening to voices coming from the riffles.

On the way to the Jeep that last day John said, “I’m glad you hear the river talk. I’ve always heard it, too. When I was younger I heard actual voices that said, “Call your Mother and I always did.” 

ENOUGH

It’s late. I’m at the vise thinking I need to tie a few flies for tomorrow. I’m just sitting here staring at the naked hook……..it occurs to me I’m okay for tomorrow. I’ll be fishing the high country somewhere in northern Colorado. It’s prime time up there right now. Everything is perfect. I’ll go with the flies I already have in my fly box. I’ll fish my 7-foot split bamboo rod with the 4-weight line. It really is that simple. I’m leaving the hook in the vise. Maybe I’ll tie some flies when I get back.....

MORE TROUT HALLUCINATIONS

I’m a day late getting back to you about those trout hallucinations in Cheesman Canyon. Let’s just say I suffered a relapse into guide/how-to head before I realized that I’m not guiding. I had a nice logical this-happens-because-of-that-resulting-in-this explanation for why the bleached-out blond Elk Hair Caddis works as a PMD imitation. It was three pages long and going strong until I realized it had nothing to do with real observation, flashy insights and adding 2 + 2 and getting 5.

The bleached-out blond Elk Hair Caddis imitates PMD’s best at the beginning of the hatch because it’s roughly the size and color of a PMD when it first makes it to the water’s surface. The trout take it because they’re already gobbling up emerging PMD’s below the water’s surface and anything that looks close to the first PMD’s to actually appear on the surface is good enough for them. That’s the logic.

How do I know that? Here’s the insight---watch how the trout take your Elk Hair Caddis when you cast to any subsurface flash you see. The nonchalant riseform looks like they’re taking a vulnerable, just emerged dun before it’s able to fly. That just isn’t they kind of splashy rise you see when there’s a caddisfly hatch. In fact, there’s nothing splashy about it at all. Some of the trout will scrutinize the fly, turn and then gently take it. They aren’t hallucinations…..or at least most of them aren’t.

Trout Hallucinations

I’m way upstream on the South Platte River in Cheesman Canyon wondering if I’m hallucinating. The hike in was tougher than I expected, but I’m not making excuses. Anyway, I thought I saw a trout flash just below the water’s surface, but I have to remind myself that I do occasionally hallucinate---especially when the fishing is a wee bit slow. It is a perfect bluebird morning. Maybe it’s just all those sparkles on the water. I’m fishing a size 18 Elk Hair Caddis. The actual elk hair is a bleached out blond color. I just like my Elk Hair Caddis that way this time of year. So anyway, I drift the fly over where I might have seen the flash. Nothing happens. I’ll call this Trout Area 51.

A few minutes later I see a brown trout perform a head-to-tail rise. Here’s the deal, I don’t usually hallucinate head-to-tails. This is as real a rise as they ever get for me. A few casts later I hook and land a nice brown trout. Cancel the Trout Area 51 alert. I’m on to something here----a real live Pale Morning Dun just popped into the air. I know trout take my washed out, bleach blond Elk Hair Caddis for emerging PMD’s. This is good. The lesson is don’t discount every hallucination. I ended up fishing a great PMD hatch on and off for the rest of the day. I’m just home now after 10 hours on the water and writing after dark. I hope it doesn’t read too weird.

You’ll see the down side to this “lone angler” business in one of the photos. It’s really hard to get good fish photos when you fish alone. There’s one I’m posting of that first brown trout in the landing net. I was messing around with him too much and had to get him released. I’ll always do that if I have to. With luck I’ll get some pals to fish with me once in a while…

I’m too tired to go on. More tomorrow….