Rolling into the Busy Season!

New Hours: (Beginning May 1)  7:30AM - 5:30 PM Open EVERY DAY

After this weekend, our open hours will be changing on May 1 - we will be open an hour and a half earlier to help you out before you hit the river and we will be open a little bit later to catch you when you roll into town to begin your trip.

The Month of May is simply BANANAS on the Deschutes - massive insect hatches begin to  blanket the river with bugs, starting about the first week of May and running well into and through June. The center stage belongs to the “salmonfly” hatch - which encompasses three species of stonefly. The salmonfly and golden stones are the big ones, followed by a smaller cousin called yellow sally. In addition to all the huge bugs, May also brings mayflies in several varieties as well as robust caddis hatches. 

To prepare for our busiest month of the year, our fly shop has been receiving huge shipments of all kinds of great flies, leaders, tippets, fly lines, reels, rods, waders, boots, t-shirts, hats, stickers, fly tying materials, and fly fishing related gadgets and the shop is now bursting at the seams with all the stuff you need to make your trip a success. Stop in and check out our insane fly selection. We are stocked to the gills on stonefly dries and we have thousands of dozens of additional flies in backstock. 

This weekend looks to be absolutely fantastic, weather-wise. The water was steadily dropping all week, which allowed me to show you the river Thursday morning at a flow that was as low as we have seen all month. As I was filming the clip at the boxcar rapid, what I didn’t know was that the dam operators had, once again, opened the flood gates that very morning with a bump in the flows of 600 CFS. We are not back to the flows of last weekend, but we lost a little of the progress we had made with dropping water all week.

https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/14092500/#dataTypeId=continuous-00065-0&period=P7D

We have absolutely no way to predict what the dam operators are going to do with the flows of the river. Most of the time, the bumps in the river are as much a surprise to us as they are to anyone. As anglers, we learn to adjust to conditions and change our tactics accordingly. There is more than one way to catch trout on this river, so come to the party prepared with a variety of flies and techniques. 

You don’t need a bunch of different rods to change your fishing techniques, if you have a 9 foot 5 weight, and you are willing and able to tie knots to change your rigging, then you have a lot of techniques available to you. 

I would start the day rigged with either two nymphs under an indicator or straight line nymphing under a bright sighter. With a 9ft 5wt rod this can be set up with a tapered leader - I would go with a 4x leader to the first nymph and use 5x material to attach a second nymph. There are many options and far more opinions than needed on how to rig for nymphing.

Nymphing Style #1: Use a 7.5 foot 4X leader with a heavy dark stonefly nymph tied to the end of it and a second nymph tied to the bend of the hook of the stonefly nymph using 4.5 or 5X tippet (fluorocarbon is the best, but nylon will work). The two nymphs can be 15” to 20” apart. If you are not using nymphs with tungsten beads on them, you may want to cut the leader about 18” above the stonefly nymph, tie the leader back together with a good blood knot, and put a few split shot weights above that knot. The knot is a stopper that keeps the split shot weights from sliding down the leader.  With this rig, most anglers will use an indicator to “indicate” what the nymphs are doing down at the depths.

On a side note before we go on with more rigging options….The indicator is not a bobber - it is not designed to float your heavy nymphs. You want your nymphs to tumble through the rocks, your indicator must be set at a point on your leader that will allow for the nymphs to get to depth. If you don’t know how deep it is, adjust your leader with longer and longer drop until you are getting stuck in the rocks on nearly every drift. 

Nymphing Style #2: Use a 9 foot leader with a heavy stonefly nymph tied to the bottom of it. Using tippet of 4.5 or 5X, tie in a tag piece on the leader about 2.5-3 feet up from the first nymph. Use a surgeon’s knot to create this 20” tag (tie the tag before attaching the bottom nymph) and attach to the tag a smaller bead head nymph like a hare’s ear, prince, or one of a thousand other patterns. On the Deschutes, using tungsten beaded nymphs is best due to our strong flows and deep water. 

Have a variety of nymphs on hand so that you can be a mad scientist out there on the water. You want different bead colors, different shapes, different body colors, bead sizes, some natural, some with hot spots, etc. Variety is essential because the exact same stuff does not always work day in and day out. 

Nymphing style #3: Euro Nymphing. To effectively Euro nymph at the highest level, it is important that you use a specialized Euro nymphing rod. This is a rod that is designed to cast flies without needing the load of a fly line. The basic idea is that you are fishing with a rod that has an extremely sensitive tip, a long reach, and you are able to load this type of rod with just the weight of a couple of flies. You do not use an indicator, but use bright sighter material instead of an indicator. The leader is extremely fine (6X or 7X) for the final 6 to 8 feet - allowing heavy nymphs to reach the depths quickly and the lack of indicator keeps the indicator from pulling the flies out of their slow drift on the river’s bottom.  IF you do not have a Euro rod, you can get close to the effectiveness and the theory of Euro nymphing by using your regular 9 foot 5 weight rod with a specialized right angle indicator that we sell in the shop. 

https://deschutesangler.com/collections/leaders-and-tippet/products/absolute-right-angle-leader

As the day progresses, your chance of seeing hatching bugs will become better and better in the month of May. Rising at the crack of dawn and being the first person on the water is great during steelhead season, as well as necessary, but trout season doesn’t demand the early start that some think it does. You will notice that most of the fishing guides that work on the Deschutes will meet clients at 8:00 for a day trip. On camp trips, trout anglers are treated to a nice sit-down breakfast in camp before hitting the river for a full day of fishing. It is more important during the month of May to start a bit later and save your energy for the evening bug activity.

Fly Shop Rock Star - Taylor with a nice rainbow caught on a day off

If you start to see heads popping in the mid-day and fish are consistently feeding in an area where you are fishing, the quickest way to de-rig your nymphing set up is to simply cut the leader off at the perfection loop where it attaches to your fly line. The nymphing leader with your nymphs tied on, maybe split shot, and an indicator - this can be wrapped around something or laid out on your back seat for later. Throw on a 9 foot 5x leader and get to fishing dries as soon as you can. After the window of the hatch has closed, you can either put your nymphing leader back on or you can leave the dry fly on and fish for a while with a dry-dropper set up. 

A dry-dropper set up, also called a hopper-dropper, uses a fairly buoyant fly on the surface which is then supporting a nymph of some sort hanging off the bend of the hook of the dry fly. The nymph can de dropped at whatever depth you choose, but most of the dropper lengths that we tend to use would be 15”-28”. When your dry fly is suddenly yanked under while floating, you have a fish on! If you have trout after trout hitting your dry fly, CUT THE DROPPER OFF! 

One more way of targeting trout on this river is to fish a streamer pattern. A streamer can be as basic as a wooly bugger, or as complex as a Sculpzilla or a Dalai Lama or a Mini Dungeon (formerly called a sex dungeon before Kelly Gallop was grilled for naming his fly that). A streamer pattern is effective when fished on a short piece of tippet attached to a sink tip. Getting the streamer pattern to sink down quickly is important, thus they are usually tied with rabbit or fur that absorbs water and with weight. Due to the weightiness of the overall rigging for streamer fishing, it will be a challenge to cast effectively on a 9 foot 5 weight, but it CAN be done. 

Of course, this is fly fishing, which is a sport that never ceases to evolve and develop new gear for every technique. Thus, the best tool for effectively launching heavy sink tips and streamers is the trout Spey rod. A trout Spey is a two-handed rod that makes casting more efficient and allows an angler to fish with obstacles behind him/her because the cast does not need to fly in the air behind the angler, the trout Spey allows the angler to roll or Spey cast. Trout like to chase down the big streamers, so it is best to cast upstream, allow the stuff to sink, and then strip that fly like crazy to elicit an attack. 

In the month of May, the mid-day hatch activity is usually a mayfly game, unless our temperatures soar into the 80s - which is what will get the stoneflies out of the trees and into the air. As for mayflies - they are usually pretty good during May, the month after which they were named. We should see a variety of Mayflies coming up soon. Our good ol’ BWO will be out there, but will be overshadowed by larger cousins such as the Pale Morning Dun, Pale Evening Dun, Pink Albert, and Green Drake. During the next six weeks we will see all of these mayflies, a trio of stoneflies, a few crane flies, caddies, and aquatic moths and more - offering the dry fly enthusiast plenty of opportunities to see a trout come to the surface to engulf that dry fly you carefully cast into the feeding lane. 

From year to year, the health of the lower Deschutes insect populations and the robustness of the lower Deschutes hatches will vary. Unfortunately, we do not see any of our insects on the Deschutes in the abundance that we once did due to water pollution violations coming out of the PGE-managed dam complex. The warm polluted water (in violation of water quality standards set by the Environmental Protection Agencey) has had a detrimental impact on mayflies above all other aquatic insects in the Deschutes (crane flies have also all but disappeared). Stoneflies - salmon flies and golden stones have also declined over the years but a bit more slowly because they have longer generational spans. Mayflies have a new generation each year, so they have had 14 generations impacted by the poor water quality since the mixing tower was installed. The stoneflies have three years for each generation, so they are going on the 4th generation to be impacted. If you want to delve into all of the reasons that the water quality has changed, you can watch this film: 

The weather forecast for this weekend looks really nice. On the last report, I looked at the wind forecast and announced happily that we would have a weekend of fishing without wind - boy was that wrong. The wind is just not something that we can really predict, BUT this weekend looks and is forecast to be fairly calm. Now that the entire river is open to fishing, you will see a lot fewer anglers crowding into the Maupin area. The pressure on the river can now be spread out in the entire lower 100 miles. 

The fishing reports from here on out will be more frequent and focused on the evolving salmon fly hatch as well as all of the other insects that hit the stage this time of year. We usually see the first adult stoneflies by Cinco de Mayo - sometimes a week earlier. This year feels like the hatch will be a little later, but having lived on this river, guided and written about the salmonfly hatch for the past 27 years, I have learned that this hatch is anything but predictable.  We will have our finger on the pulse of the river and will continue to keep you informed.