A Beautiful Spring Weekend Ahead

The sun is rising over the canyon walls and this looks to be a stunning weekend for fishing on the Deschutes. We are not forecast to get into the high 60s or low 70 degrees today, tomorrow, or Sunday, and the days are forecast to be calm (very little wind on any day Friday-Sunday). We will have sun most of the day today, followed by partly cloudy skies on Saturday and mostly cloudy skies on Sunday. Cloud cover is great - especially with very little wind. This will set us up for really good mayfly hatches in the mid-day. 

We are still seeing okay numbers of March Brown mayflies in the mid-day as well as Blue Winged Olive mayflies. Leading up to the hatch (which pops off around noon to one) you will have really good success fishing March Brown tungsten soft hackles as droppers off of dries or as one of your deeply fished nymphs. You might also try an unweighted soft hackle or an unweighted pheasant tail fished just subsurface next to a dry fly. 

We have been having very cold and rainy and blustery weather all week, so the fishing has been challenging due to the weather conditions. Streamer fishing has still been really good for many people, especially if you are using a sink-tip off of a trout Spey set up. The trout Spey allows you to cast your fly out across the river despite having a bunch of trees and brush behind you, and the sink tip will allow your streamer to get down a little bit before you begin to strip it through the current with short bursts. Sculpin patterns, leech patterns, and other streamer patterns have been working well for the streamer strippers. 

The caddis are out in good numbers now and they will continue to be a significant presence on the river from now through the summer and into fall. Caddis are the bread and butter meal for Deschutes trout. Trout will eat caddis in the morning when they are spent (or all night when the moon is full), and will always be looking for the egg-laying females in the foam lines during the day. As many of you know, on the Deschutes during our warm spring and hot summer days, the evening time can be absolutely magical. Once the sun dips below the edge of the canyon and the water has that soft rosy glow, the trout lose their weariness and begin to chomp on caddis as they emerge from the river.

I remember my first days of fishing the Deschutes when I was a novice angler. This was back in the early 1990s, so the hatches were a lot more robust and the river far less busy than it is today.  I would work hard all day to catch a few trout - usually by nymphing under an indicator - and most that I caught were just by kind of dumb luck as I moved around the river from spot to spot. My big mistake was thinking that I had to be wading waist-deep in the river in order to have a chance at hooking something. I had paid $50 for my non-breathable Red Ball waders, and I was going to get out there and stand in the river wherever I could - which was usually the riffle water or flat sandy areas without too many boulders. The places that were friendly to my wading and casting, it turns out, were not places that held a lot of trout. So, I would wade and fish all day, but I would move around from spot to spot frequently enough that I was bound to bumble into really good trout water. When I pitched my nymphs into water that was too deep and rocky to wade, THAT was when I would hook up on the best trout of my young angling life. But the evenings were what I lived for. Evening on the Deschutes brought all the big trout to the party - and the river would boil with rising rainbows. Now it wasn’t always easy to guess the pattern that they would take - they were still picky Deschutes Trout. I was probably using tippet that was too thick - for picky dry fly eaters you need 5X or smaller (5.5X or 6X if your rod is soft enough to cushion it). I was probably, back in that day, not changing my fly frequently enough - I may not have been carrying a large enough selection of caddis to have options other than a simple elk hair. If I had known then what I know now, I could have modified an elk hair caddis into something more scruffy and appealing to the trout by pinching it or trimming it with my nippers. But some evenings, just by luck, I had the right fly on and had a lot of success on dries in the twilight hours on the Deschutes. 

This week, on Wednesday the 22nd, the entire river opens to fishing - we expect that will greatly ease the pressure on the Maupin area as many Portland and Bend folks go to fish the Trout Creek or Warm Springs/Mecca areas. This weekend is the last weekend of the year when the only option for Deschutes trout anglers is to fish in and around Maupin.

All month long we are receiving our inventory for the year - so you should expect to see the fly shop simply bursting at the seams with really great fishing gear. Our fly selection is second to none - the bins are overflowing with all the favorite patterns. When we know that a pattern is really successful for people on the river, we go deep. In some of our little 2”x2” squares of fly patterns, we are 600 flies deep in one color/bead size of the popular patterns - and often have even more in backstock ready to fill the bins. 

We have a new employee starting today, Luke Koerner from Portland. Luke grew up in Portland and has been fishing the Deschutes since he was a kid - with a hiatus to go to college in Bozeman, Montana. We kicked off his employment last night with a huge company dinner at the Hazel house. John cooked up some delicious antelope meat which was a gift from one of our local customers, THANKS STEVEN! It was fun bonding and telling jokes around the table with the staff and getting to know Luke. 

We have a visiting shop dog - a ten month old golden doodle named Huck. He is a sweetie, but his tail is causing chaos as he walks around the shop as he is happily knocking merchandise off the pegs. He helped me write this fishing report this morning….

We hope to see you all this weekend.