Oddity of Bugs

I took the little guy out yesterday again as this may be the last time before the season is full on and I won't have time. In fact, if my clients show up today, I'll be doing my first significant stretch of days of the season this week. He does understand the drill. I work with him during the off-season and as his school year reaches the end, he knows I will be gone for a few months before we get together again.

The fishing was a bit slower yesterday but we did nymph up fish on caddis pupas. Just above the take-out however, we ran into a pod of fish working right along the bank. These are the ones you want. They lay in shallow water right along the bushes just gulping bugs. They can be a bit difficult to get to because of the brush and the fact that the current swirls in the shallow water but they are non-stop eaters. They also can be a little spooky and with the sun high and absolutely no clouds, any shadow over them will send them off the shelf into deeper water.

I had brought a dry-fly rod but with the sunny conditions and lack of bugs, I didn't even set it up. But you can't drift by a pod of fish working like these guys without taking a shot. So I put my rod together, mounted the reel and threaded the line through the guides and then looked into the water to see what they were eating.

In the past few weeks we've had anything from midges to drakes and everything in-between. Caddis have started working a few days ago and I saw beatis last week. Yesterday however, there was nothing big on the water. The way these fish were eating, their entire heads were coming out of the water and they were just gulping bug after bug so the bugs had to be on the surface, there had to be tons of them and I was guessing they had to be very small. When I looked I could see hundreds of tiny little may fly spinners; probably size 22 or 24. Crazy. They looked like pseudos but they can't be because they don't hatch until late August and September.

I tied on an elk-hair caddis that I tied with the undercoat I took from Chase, my late great chocolate lab; I call it the Labrador. Behind that I tied on a trico spinner. I took one cast and gulp, he hate the caddis. I fought it for a good couple runs before popping him off but it was cool.

We headed down-stream and about fifty yards later, another pod was working. I took a crack at them and one of them ate the trico...didn't land that one either. The rest of this pod stayed up however, so I took another shot and another rainbow gulped the trico. I did land that one.

It's going to be a weird year so you have to be prepared to try everything. We have bugs now I haven't seen on the Missouri. The weeds are already taking hold and fish are not real picky...yet. The more they get pounded the more selective they will get.

Keep 'em where they live...