Friday of Memorial Day Weekend

It’s Friday morning, and I awake to find another calm and cloudy day, which makes me think that we have another chance at getting several mayfly hatches today. These mayfly hatches could be Pale Morning Duns, Pale Evening Duns, Pink Alberts, or the coveted Green Drake. Onsies and twosies of the Green Drake were spotted yesterday, but the full-on Green Drake hatch has eluded us thus far. We still have a few more weeks with high potential for Green Drakes, so be ready whenever you are on the water, especially if the day is cloudy or rainy. Any Mayfly hatch is a fun hatch to fish, mainly because the trout get so happy.

Pale Evening Dun - dark on top and creamy yellow underneath.

The mid-day mayfly hatches are a nice addition to the main show - which is the stonefly festival going on in the trees  and bushes along the river. The stoneflies have been here now for over three weeks and they are getting restless. The females have pouches of eggs on the back of their abdomen - noticeable black clusters of teeny tiny eggs. This is Deschutes caviar - crunchy like the orange flying fish eggs you get on your sushi rolls in a Japanese restaurant. 

The stoneflies are just waiting now for some heat to get them flying - though I saw several on the wing this week despite temperatures in the low 60s. If you are wondering why I am talking about stoneflies, and not “salmonflies,” please read last weekend's fishing report which explains that we have three species of stoneflies hatching simultaneously this month. Now that we are entering the final stage of the hatch, the golden stoneflies and little yellow sally stoneflies are much more important to our fishing strategy and the salmonflies are old news. Since the golden and yellow stones are the ones that land on the water to lay eggs, they will be available to trout from here on out. 

The biggest change in fishing strategy for this stage of the salmonfly hatch is that the trout will now be spreading out into the entire river, rather than just hanging on the edge looking for stoneflies to drop off the branches. Since the golden stones are landing everywhere on the water during egg laying, you will be able to find the trout looking up even out in the middle of the riffles, If you have a Trout Spey (two-handed rod) you can try chucking your dry fly way out towards center river where trout rarely see artificial flies. Since fishing from the boat is not allowed, the trout near the center of the river are some of the least pressured. The challenge to casting a bushy dry fly out into a center river riffle is to keep the fly from immediately dragging. This will require either quick mending or slack line casting. 

Farewell, Salmonflies! It's been fun.

Another excellent strategy for fishing at this stage in the hatch is to fish a very light and natural stonefly, like a Clark’s Stone or a Norm Woods Special. I avoid the purple stoneflies or the huge and bushy white-wings on flies because I am often allowing my dries to become waterlogged and drown. The reason for fishing a drowned/slightly submerged stonefly is that you are able to fool a few of the biggest trout in the river - those that are shell-shocked from all the fishing pressure and refusing to rise to the surface. Sometimes I will even slide a small piece of split shot about 6 inches above the dry fly to help it sink down just below the surface. 

"It's time for me to fly...." Golden Stone

Speaking of shell-shocked and over-pressured trout, it has been busy on the river all week and those anglers that are continuing to go to the exact same five spots each day are learning about the importance of resting prime water. Guides know that a spot can only take so much fishing pressure before the trout get lock jaw. Trout have good memories - thus the reason that catch and release angling makes the river a more challenging one to fish. Back in the “good old days” when people whacked ‘em and stacked ‘em, the trout didn’t get to live long enough to learn self-preservation in choosing their next meal. Once they were caught, they were done. 

I like the challenge of a technical river with finicky fish, but it can be extremely frustrating to anglers who don’t understand how to fish a river like the Deschutes. Let me give you my top five tricks for fishing the Deschutes - things you can take with you For the rest of the spring and summer. 

1. Find water that has the depth and cover that make a trout feel like he/she can escape from danger. This water will typically have a rocky bottom or a lot of large boulders, a depth of 4-8 feet, an over-hanging tree, and rafts of foam pushing through with some frequency. This will be very difficult or even impossible water to wade, and equally as difficult to find room for casting due to the jungle-like nature of your surroundings.  Often your first impression of this water will be that it is too fast and too turbulent to appeal to trout - you would be surprised at the water trout manage to call home in the spring and summer.
2. Always work your dry flies upstream/upcurrent. If you are fishing one of the large back eddies on the Deschutes, you have to work the back eddy facing downstream in relation to the eventual flow of the main channel but facing upstream in relation to the back eddy. Trout will always be facing nose into the current, always looking up into the foam lines for their next insect meal. If you are upstream of the trout, they can see you and they will be lock-jawed or extra wary. 
3. Use the finest tippet you and your rod can handle. I fish 5X tippet for my dry flies, only shifting down to 4X tippet for casting the chunkiest of the stonefly dries. I use nylon whenever fishing dry flies because nylon floats. Fluorocarbon sinks and is more invisible than nylon, so I use that tippet material for all of my trailing nymphs in the hopper-dropper set up. 
4. Tie good knots and be skilled enough at knot tying to have no hesitation to changing flies. When you can quickly rebuild your leader or quickly change flies, you will be more likely to do so. Why is this skill important? It allows you to play a game of chess with each rising trout you encounter. If I see a big trout feed under a tree, or in front of a rock, or anywhere that I can get into position below it to make an upstream cast, I am going to work that trout with all the tools I have in my tool box. 

• • I will first use the tool of stealth to sneak up on the fish, moving slowly like a Great Blue Heron to get into a spot where a cast is possible. 
  • I will next use the tool of patience to wait for the fish to feed again. Big trout often have a pattern of feeding, moving, repositioning, and holding. Some will stay in a small area while surfing the hydraulics in front of a boulder, while others might have a small micro-backeddy as a habitat and will move around freely in an area the size of a kiddy pool. I need to know the habit of that trout before I consider making a cast.
  • I will use my keen vision, my polarized sunglasses, and maybe even a small pair of binoculars, to hone in on the feeding behavior to see if I can identify the insect species the trout is eating.
  • I will make an educated selection from the many flies I have with me, and I will tie on that selection while standing in the wake of this large trout. If the fly is large and bushy and may cause my leader to become super tangly due to twisting in mid-air with each cast I make, I will tie it on with the non-twist knot(see video below)
  • I will use my fly casting skills to gauge the correct distance of cast and will lay this fly gently on the water so that just the end of the leader and the fly land two feet upstream of the trout’s nose. 
  • I will refrain from ripping the fly off the water if it lands to the left or right of my intended target. I will repeat the mantra, “Every cast is a good cast” and let the fly float drag free out of the spooky zone before picking it up to recast. 
  • I will immediately change the fly if it gets looked at, bumped, or other wise rejected by the trout. I will not rocket a rejected fly back out into the feeding lane because doing that will, most certainly, cause that trout to be on high alert and extra extra wary and picky - if it doesn’t just drop slowly away into the depths to sulk. Rejection is where the chess game gets really interesting and where your fly selection becomes critically important. If you only have two stonefly patterns or two stoneflies in your box, you don’t have enough depth to play this game. 
  • I will give the trout time to rest while changing the fly and will wait even a few minutes longer before making another offer to the trout in the form of a different fly pattern.
  • I will keep an open mind during the stonefly hatch and will not only focus on the hatch that I want to fish (big bugs, of course) but will be willing to tie on a small mayfly or caddis in order to fool the fish. 
  • If my fly is drown by the turbulent currents, I will allow it to drift through the trout water as a submerged drowning stonefly. While fishing a submerged dry you must have a laser vision connection to the part of your leader that is near the surface and be ready to se the hook if you see anything that literally “looks fishy.”
  • If I play the game well and hook that fish, I will fight it as quickly as possible, keep it wet, and release it carefully so that I can fish for it again one day.

5. Fish water that delivers food to the fish. This means that you look for the outside bend of the river where the water pushes against you as you wade. If the river isn’t bending or curving in the area where you are fishing, look for high grass lines or riverside trees with depth and foam lines. Often these are places that require a climb down from the road or a scramble through the thick trees. This is “jungle water.” The inside bends of the river, where wading on sandy bottom or pea gravel is easy and there are few obstacles to impede your casting, should be avoided (unless you just enjoy the art of casting and/or fishing just for the sake of fishing). Standing in ankle-deep water in front of a campground or in a boat launch might not be the best fish-finding strategy.

I wish for all of you a big Green Drake hatch one of these days soon - keep the faith, they have to come out sometime soon!

A Green Drake in all its glory.

Here is a video about a knot that we use when fishing large-winged flies in order to keep those flies from twisting up our leaders:

Since the fishing reports are frequently read at his time of year, I am once again sharing the link to the Deschutes River Alliance sponsored movie, The Last 100 Miles. If you want to understand the challenges we are facing with water quality on the Deschutes, this is a must-watch.  Click the link below to watch the full movie.