Fly lines

Conditions were not what I expected. The trout were not up and feeding in the eddies as I had hoped they would be.

Normally, on a trip down the Deschutes in early summer, you will float through clouds of emerging caddis. Today there was only a handful of bugs in the air.

Earlier in the month, around the Fourth of July, there had been a small spate of caddis activity. I thought then that the hatch was starting, but it never actually materialized. It was as if the hatch had begun but then simply died off.

We experimented with a variety of water types, trying to locate fish. We looked in the eddies, we looked in the riffles, we fished the swirling waters along the rip-rap banks. Nothing was consistent.

It was simply luck of the draw when, on occasion, we stumbled onto a pod of active fish.

In those few places where the fish were up and feeding, the dry fly action was good. The trout where very willing. Finding the fish was the trick; there was a lot of water between them.

By working hard and moving quickly, by covering the territory, we gradually made what started as a very slow day into a half-decent one. Even so, it clearly was not up to the usual high standard for midsummer fishing. Even during the twilight hatch, the rise only reached a moderate pitch, we never saw any of the heavy feeding to which we are accustomed.

By the second day it was time to get going with the research - I needed to pin down the fishing a bit more. We started doing some nymphing. The subsurface tactics worked consistently around the bottoms of the riffles. We began mixing up our fishing a bit more - dry fly when the fish were showing - nymphing when they were not. Our overall success improved.

I took some stomach samples from the fish we caught while nymphing. (Sampling was done carefully with a turkey baster like squeeze bulb. All fish where released unharmed.)

Even though the trout where caught on caddis pupa imitations, their stomachs, without exception, held nothing but emerging mayflies. Some rock rolling in the riffles above where we had been fishing revealed large populations of clinging mayflies with the wing pads ripe, ready to hatch.

We adjusted flies for a better imitation. We put on some size # 14 Flash Back Pheasant Tails - they were a very close match. Success went up another notch. We also fine-tuned the dry fly fishing. We moved from using various caddis imitations to a yellow or yellow/olive mayfly pattern to achieve a better match of the adult mayflies.

With all these adjustments, we finally had the fishing back on track. We had slowly converted a not-so-good trip into a very fine fishing outing.

The best part of the sampling and research is that we found the missing caddis, too. The samples revealed hundreds of caddis larva not even sealed in their cases yet.

Apparently the hatching cycle has been disrupted during the cool weather and high water of early spring. The caddis appear to be at least 15 to 20 days from hatching - maybe more.

If you're going to visit the Deschutes anytime soon, be prepared to adjust your tactics. Switch your focus from caddis to mayflies.

Don't be afraid to make plans for August. It looks like the July caddis hatch could happen right in the middle of what is normally considered to be the August slump.