April Fools? You are not a fool unless you are not fishing!!

Open 7 days a week starting April 1. 9AM to 5PM (there is no reason to get an early start on these cool crisp days)

The cool spring days have returned to the Deschutes and the wind will be a factor from Sunday through Wednesday of this week. We may also see some rain next week – which can be great for the mayfly hatches if the wind ever dies off. High temperatures for the next few days will be in the low 60s and high 50s with the thermometer dropping close to freezing levels overnight.

Wind (or the “W” word which shall not be spoken aloud) is pretty much a guarantee during the month of April. It isn’t necessarily harmful to the fishing – the trout still have to eat every day and the wind doesn’t blow down under the surface of the water. The wind does impact the hatches a bit because the bugs emerging from the depths will get blown off of the river as soon as they break through the surface of the water. I’ll be the first to admit that casting into the wind isn’t a whole lot of fun at times, but there are tricks to working with the wind instead of fighting against it.

Trick #1 – if the wind is blowing hard downstream (this is often what happens when cold fronts are moving through in the spring) it might be best to find a backeddy to fish. A backeddy is a spot on the river, as big as a house or as small as a tv screen, where the water flows the opposite direction as the main stretch of the river. Call it a whirlpool – sometimes that is what they look like. Since the wind is blowing hard downstream, you can find a backeddy and cast WITH the wind to make your life that much easier.

Trick #2 – Move around on the river. In the Maupin area, you have 40 miles of river to fish. It often happens that the wind is howling in one section and very light 20 or 30 miles up or downstream. I cannot explain this, I had to live it to believe it, but I have had trees coming down and wind whipping water off the tops of the whitecaps on the river in one section – only to pull the boat out and drive up or downstream to another section where the wind turned out to be light and variable.

Trick #3- Throw in the towel and head to the fly shop. We will ease the pain of the wind for you.

There have been an interesting smattering of insects around lately – BWOs, skwala stones, big brown caddis (no joke, size 12), the odd March Brown (if they are coming it will be soon) and the ubiquitous midge hatch. Dry dropper fishing has actually out performed Euro nymphing on some days – the trout are starting to really look up.

I am going to wrap this up now, without playing an April Fools joke on any of you. I was going to write about the dam bursting and the lower end of Maupin plus the bridge getting blown to pieces, but I couldn’t find the creative gumption today and was very busy fielding phone calls.