Caddis Chronicles

Since I last posted, I've fished a few times and the Gods have smiled on me. Saturday morning, I hit a local river and caught browns, brookies and rainbows. I thought I'd see blue-winged olives when arrived as it was warm, overcast and humid. Fish were rising fairly steadily up and down the first, long run I stepped into. Not many flies were in the air, mostly caddis. After checking the water surface for a while, and watching the fish as they rose to spent flies, I tied on what I saw - spent wing egg-laying caddis, size #16. A few casts later, a nice rainbow that was sipping the egg-laiden flies just a few inches off a large, smooth, round rock along the opposite bank, rose to take my offering.

I fished up the run taking a number of fish, most of the stocked variety, but also a couple of smaller, richly colored wild fish. By noon I was off the water and heading home to spend the afternoon doing chores and errands with Karen. I took pics, but the camera is in my car at the office.......meeting in the City tomorrow early so I took a company car, its good for the paint job.

Last night after dinner with the family, I headed out again. This time to a different stretch of the same river. No one was on the water I chose when I arrived at about 7:30PM. It was cool, calm and partly cloudy, the sun peaking out whenever it got the chance. I knew the long, flat pool held lots of trout, as it always has and although the surface was free of the dimples and expanding rings from rising trout, I figured the sulphurs just had to show.

The first half hour I took one trout that was rising lazily in a steady rhythm, 1-2-3-4-rise, 1-2-3-4-rise, to what turned out ot be small caddis. Then, as though someone flipped a bug switch, sulphurs began to show. As time passed, their numbers increased, and with that the trout started to feed on them. By 8:15, we (me and the trout) were in the midst of another Sulphur Riot! A well placed cast to a rising fish with a snowshoe rabbit foot sulphur dun tied to the end of my 12 foot leader tapered to 6X, was all it took. It got so that I knew the second my fly touched the water on a cast, whether it would elicit a strike, or be ignored. The more I concentrated on making good, drag-free presentations, the more I hooked up on successive casts. When that happens, you shut off all tension in your mind and body, and just let your subconcious run the show. It may be the closet thing to true peace I can find. I fished til dark, almost fell in wading out of the river because I stepped on a large subsurface rock, and I caught about 2 dozen trout.......all on the same fly.

I'll post some pics tomorrow.

Life is Good. Get out and do something that takes you to another world....anything!