BYE BYE SALMONFLY! HELLO CADDIS!

We will be closed on Saturday at 2:00 PM to attend a memorial service for Dale Madden. We open again at 8:00 AM on Sunday morning. 

We wake this morning to some rather brisk and windy weather - a sign of a cold front moving in for the weekend. Tomorrow is supposed to be colder and twice as windy, so this will impact people's fishing a bit because trout tend to get a little lockjaw when the cold fronts sweep through. 

The big bugs are pretty much gone now - there may be a straggler here or there and the fish way up river may still attack a big bug since they are fresh in the memory banks, but it looks like we have another salmonfly hatch behind us. Let the best trout fishing begin!

When the big bugs disappear, so too do the crowds of anglers and hoards of guides. Most of the guide operations that do back to back guide trips from Trout Creek to Maupin have packed things up and are moving on to other rivers or heading to Alaska to guide for the summer. This does not mean that the trout fishing is not good in June, July, August, and September - it can be some of the best of the year. You do, however, have to know how to fish changing hatches and how to fish smaller insects. 

The caddis and mayflies are the main menu items for trout in the summer on the Deschutes but aquatic moths and tiny aquatic craneflies are also very important to rounding out the trout diet. Have a fly box with several different colors of caddis - tan, brown, olive, grey, and black. The EC Caddis or X Caddis are good choices for patterns.

The EC Caddis (above) has a low profile and sits right in the surface film.

In addition, be ready with parachute-style and comparadun-style no-hackle mayfly imitationsin all different colors such as tan, light grey, purple, and yellow. 

Professional hand model, Ruby Selis, shows off a great selection of flies.

Using a dropper nymph below your dry fly will up your hook-ups and may trigger a few trout into looking up to the surface. I find that many trout will rise up a few inches to intercept a dropper nymph, and when they tilt up to grab that dropper, they often see the dry and go for it. 

The crowds on the river will be pretty much non-existent relative to what you may have experienced last month. Campgrounds are wide-open, the river is pretty much empty, and the trout are now feeding on insects that hatch consistently each day. The summer starts now! We will see you on the water.