The first of the big bugs are crawling from the river!

Sunday morning fishing report - sorry for the tardiness, things are busy around here. We had a beautiful day on Friday followed by a hideous day Saturday (VERY WINDY). Nonetheless, anglers are coming in and out of the shop quite happy with the fishing success that they are having on the Deschutes. Yes, we are still weeding through the rafts of suicidal hatchery steelhead smolts, but they are slowly working their way down river and out to the ocean. 

Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, by the way. This is a day that, in past years, we would find quite a few adult stoneflies freshly hatched along the river's edge. I drove up river this morning at 7:00 AM in search of a few stones in the grasses and found none - however, chatting with anglers in the shop, several of them have seen the salmonflies crawling around in the past few days in the Maupin area. As it gets a little bit warmer, we will see more and more bugs crawling out of the river and crawling out of their nymphal shucks. 

From tomorrow all through the week next week we will be seeing temperatures climbing through the eighties and into the nineties by the weekend. This is exactly what we need to get those bugs to clamber out of the river and into our lives. 

The lifecycle of the stonefly is amazing - they live for three years on the bottom of the river as nymphs. Salmonflies are vegetarians, eating the edible weed growth on the rocks. Golden stones, on the other hand, are carnivores who eat other insects such as mayflies, caddies, and craneflies. After three years, in early May, the stoneflies begin migrating. Some will drift migrate a bit, allowing themselves to be tumbled down the river in order to get to an area where they will have a bit more biological diversity - even stoneflies know that it isn't right to hook up with a sibling or a first cousin. 

Once the water temperatures are just right, the stones will begin marching towards shore. They "emergence" isn't exactly a hatch - not in the sense of bugs rising from the bottom of the river and getting eaten on the surface by sipping trout. The emergence mostly happens at night, which makes it hard for us to see. You have to look deep into the grass clumps and scour the riverside tree branches to find the early bugs. Yesterday and this morning were quite chilly out here, and that made it difficult to find any bugs before work. I got excited up at Harpham when I thought I saw my first salmonfly in a tree, but I got closer to it to discover that it was a fly but one that came from our shop!

Not in perfect focus - but you can see how I was fooled...... 

As anyone who has hung out at the shop for a hot minute knows, Gabor is one creative guy! He is responsible for all the tie-dye hats and shirts in the shop, he dyes a lot of our custom feathers, he is an incredible photographer, and he recently turned his mad scientist mind towards the salmonfly hatch. Gabor fixed up an aquarium/terrarium last week and stocked it with a few stonefly nymphs and other aquatic insects seined from the rocks. He was able to capture the full emergence of a salmonfly from nymph to adult and he shares it with us on his YouTube channel. Check out this amazing time lapse footage:

If you are one of the many anglers who loves to tie up unique fly patterns, take note of the white fluffy areas on the underside of the stonefly nymph. These are the gills and this is a trigger for trout. A few strategically placed ostrich herl pieces will perfectly imitate these gills. Notice that the salmonfly has a couple of distinctive orange bands and is not entirely black. These are all elements for you creative tyers to incorporate into your flies. 

If you don't tie, fear not! We gear up all year in anticipation of this hatch and the swarms of anglers that this hatch brings to our community. We have thousands of dozens of flies in the bins and waiting in backstock in order to get you the ammo you need. We will not run out, so you can wait to buy your flies here at Deschutes Angler where we can also give you the latest up to date information on which exact patterns are working for anglers. 

The advantage to being a destination fly shop is our ability to communicate with anglers and guides minutes off the water. A city fly shop may see an angler before they drive out to the Deschutes and they may talk to them a week after they return from the Deschutes, but the information is already a week old at that point. We live on the river, we talk to dozens of anglers daily in the middle of their fishing trips, and we sell flies to many of the guides who supply them to their clients on trips. When they stop in to resupply on flies, we are able to chat about the hatch and what the guides have seen in different sections of the river. We have shop staff fishing before and after work and on their days off, so we are always up to speed on the insects happening on the river. 

If you have a guide trip booked for the month of May, congratulations! This is a difficult time to find a guide with available dates. If you are still looking for a guide, leave emails and be patient - the guides out on the water cannot check email. They will get back to you as soon as they are able. We have several guides listed on our website - though we are no longer booking guides directly through our fly shop. 

This report will be updated frequently this month - things are changing daily and the greatest diversity of bug hatches will be taking place in the next 5-6 weeks. Don't cancel a trip to the Deschutes because it looks like it might rain. Overcast humid days in May and June are epic because they spur mayfly hatches. When mayflies are hatching, the trout could not care less about eating a salmonfly. Trout prefer mayflies over all other bugs that hatch on the Deschutes, and the possibility of BWOs, Pale Morning Duns, Pale Evening Duns, Pink Alberts, and/or Green Drakes hatching is exponentially higher when clouds cover up our central Oregon sunshine. So, if the forecast calls for rain, it also calls for epic mayfly hatches and great dry fly fishing. 

Things will be getting busy on the weekends out here as the month progresses. Next weekend is Mother's Day, so that may keeo a few folks home, but those that venture out here will certainly be treated to lots and lots of salmonfly activity - given the fact that the forecast calls for temperatures to reach the 90s. As things get busier and busier, please try to respect the river and the rules that are in place to keep this river pristine. 

Camping, whether in a tent, a van, a camper, a trailer, an RV, or sleeping in the back of your truck is ONLY allowed in a paid BLM campground. Yes, this is BLM land, but dispersed camping is illegal along the road and you are very likely to be fined by the BLM ranger and/or the state police who patrol the access road several times each day and night.  A campground fee is $8 on weekdays and $12 on weekends. The fees collected in the campgrounds are an important part of the funds that pay for road maintenance, toilets, garbage collection, and campground clean up. If you want to camp for free, spend the $12 in fuel to drive up the road and into the national forest. I am sorry to report to you that your overland camping app is wrong about the roadside pullouts along the Deschutes that it recommends.

We are excited for the hatch to progress over the coming days and we will keep you up to date on what we are seeing in the Maupin area. Fish On!

Update 3:07 PM May 4 - just drove a few miles downstream of Maupin and found lots of stonefly adults in the bushes. I did not go below the White River (though it is in fine shape) but I found zero stoneflies upriver this morning. Just a few miles downstream of Maupin.