Well, the guiding season is in full force right now and it has been absolutely tremendous! In fact I would say that the early season has been one of the best I’ve ever witnessed. The trout have fed non-stop and we’ve had several clients experience fish counts in the thirties.
Here are a few tactics I’ve been using in my guiding that may help you improve your success.
First, I have not been fishing the surface in spite of the fact that there are thousands of Grannoms. This is one hatch that usually brings them up, but I’ve not seen them rise with any consistency thru the entire hatch, so I stayed underneath…and DEEP. Second, I have been fishing BWO nymphs in a size 16 since the beginning of March, and they’ve been eating them since. I’ve yet to find a reason to change rigs, though I’ve been looking.
The rig I’ve been using is a three fly rig. The top fly is a BWO soft hackle hanging off of a three inch dropper. Eighteen inches under that is a heavy tungsten bead olive nymph and six inches off the bend of the hook is a non-weighted olive nymph. 90% of the fish caught are on the last fly. The weight (split-shot) is applied between the top two flies. (usually 3 to 6 #2 shot)
I have tried to change the rig over several times to match the caddis, but the olive nymphs worked better. I did find some moderate success with a deep sparkle pupa as the point fly.
Look for water with a moderate chop to it at the bottom end of a riffle or heavy run. The trout have been stacked in there and have fed from sun up to sun down. H
ere are some pictures from the past two weeks.
