Rising trout on a glassy Crooked River during the last weekend of February.
My fly-fishing vest sports a shiny, oily stain just below the spot where my dry-fly floatant bottle dangles from a little loop.
That stain started -- and gets bigger -- every time I puzzle over fussy, tough rising trout. The trout refuse one fly after another, and I have to keep showing the fish new flies. The trout bulge the water under the new fly -- but don't take it -- so, it's back to the vest, the fly box and the floatant.
All this usually happens when nice trout are rising to small mayflies or midges on glassy water. The slow, porpoising rises of the trout drive me nuts -- and then the water turns glassy again for a few seconds. It all looks like Trout-O-Rama is about to start, but -- too often -- it takes me a while to figure out what the fish are actually eating.
Are they taking midge emergers in the surface film -- or are they tipping and sipping on adults stuck into tiny pupal shucks? Wait -- did that fish just eat a blue-winged olive dry fly? When a trout takes a long look at a fly -- or rejects it at the last second, that's a clue I'm on the right track. If a fly floats over a rising trout without a reaction of any kind, well, I'm headed in the wrong direction.
The frustrating -- and fun -- routine of clipping off the old fly, tying on a new fly and applying a dab of floatant goo continues until I find a fly that fools the trout.
Or until the sun sets and I can't see to cast or tie on a new fly.
So, the open lid of the floatant bottle slowly dribbles expensive, slimy stuff onto my vest. I often forget to close the bottle when -- or if -- I finally stumble onto the new fly, so the stain gets a little bigger whenever the trout rise. All this happened -- yet again -- on Oregon's Crooked River during the last weekend of February.
I got to the river early on a cloudy Friday afternoon, and a tireless rain shower shrouded the river in tiny dimples. But quite a few bigger dimples showed that blue-winged olive mayflies -- bugs that love dark, damp, cold days -- were hatching in rafts. The tiny bugs -- a size 20 -- looked like tiny sailboats, and the wild Crooked River rainbow trout were up and gobbling down the helpless mayflies.
The Crooked River seethes with trout food. Scuds, mayfly nymphs, caddis and midges teem in the rocks and flowing weeds. This river, which flows out of the bottom of Bowman Dam, is a lot like a spring creek. The Crooked is justly famous for good fishing from fall all the way through winter to spring -- unless an arctic blast ices up the pools and runs. A sudden rise in water flows -- especially cold water in spring -- also can shut down the fish for a day or two. The trout get used to higher water fairly quickly, but it pays to keep tabs on river flows -- especially if the drive to the river is a long one.
The trout were pretty silly for a size 20 olive Sparkle Dun, and, while I bungled my share of fish, I also managed to leave the river -- at dark -- feeling very good about the day.
"We'll do it again tomorrow," I told Berkeley, my Labrador retriever cross. Berks wagged his wet tail and we headed into the nearby town of Prineville. We needed for a motel room, a shower -- for me -- and hamburgers for both of us.
I was wrong about that. Saturday dawned cold and cloudless. The sun beat into the clear water of the Crooked River and evidently scared the bejabbers out of the trout. The Crooked River usually flows with a cloudy, milky tinge, thanks to some silt in upstream tributaries. The trout are used to cloudy water, and they find dry flies with no problem at all, although it is often a better idea to tie a scud or Pheasant Tail nymph to the leader.
But the Crooked can turn clear as chilled vodka during the low flows of winter. All that sudden sunlight laced into the clear water and freaked out the trout. I walked along the river and admired the clear water. I also had trouble finding happy fish.
I found hundreds of rocks covered with cased Grannom caddis larvae, and I bet the Mother's Day Caddis Hatch will have the trout frothing the surface in a few months.
I know these caddis are Grannoms -- the classic Mother's Day Caddis Hatch -- as I read Dave Hughes and Rick Hafele's bug books all the time, and there is no mistaking the tapering, square-sided cases these caddis make.
Grannom caddis in the telltale cases gathered on Crooked River rocks. Some rocks in this ultra-fertile river were coated with bugs.
But I missed those wonderful clouds and rising trout. I cast my tanden rig of a Copper John and a scud fly into the deeper holes, but I had better luck with whitefish than trout.
Then I saw Berkeley lounging in the shade of a tree -- the sun cooked the canyon, and it was about 60 degrees out there on the last weekend of February. A bell went off in my head, and we tramped off in search of some shady water. Luckily, afternoon shade is easy to find on a desert canyon river.
A wild Crooked River rainbow trout are some of the prettiest fish around.
A dark shadow was making its way from a tall, basalt bluff to a glassy section of river, and I sat down on one of the thousands of handy rocks along the river to change my rig. I was pretty sure that a midge hatch was going to start when the shade arrived on the water. I wish I could say I have the Crooked that dialed in, but I don't. I figured midges -- those small, harmless relatives of the mosquito -- would hatch because I could see a few bugs already drifting on the water.
But what would those spooky trout do?
I got into a good spot, greased up my Biplane with gooey floatant and waited. Trout began rising as soon as it got shady, and some of them were pretty big. All of them were pretty picky. I changed to a size 20 Griffith Gnat Emerger and hooked two smallish trout right away. Then the fish boiled under -- but did not eat that fly. I peered at the water for a while -- my nose was almost touching the surface -- and it seemed like a lot of adult midges were riding downstream. I tied on one of A.K. Best's simple dry midges -- the one with the trailing pupal shuck and the cool wing made out of the waffle-printed section on zip-lock baggies. I got boils and rises -- but no hookups.
I tied on a pupa pattern with a little foam shellback that helps in float in the surface film. No rises at all. I tried some other patterns, and that shiny spot on my vest got a little shinier and bigger.
Then I looked at my tippet. It was kind of short -- and, at 5X, maybe too heavy for that flat, glassy, clear water. I tied on a two-foot section of 6X -- and put the A.K. Best fly back on. After all, the fish seemed to want that fly.
I hooked a nice trout -- about 12 inches long on the first cast. Hmmm. Maybe I had the right fly earlier, but I needed a better tippet. I hooked another fish a few casts later. This trout bored off upstream with the steady power of a big, broad-shouldered fish.
The fish rolled at that glassy surface, my heart rattled around in my chest, and floatant dribbled onto my vest.
