Help clean up the Bitterroot River in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana on: Saturday, Sept 11, 2010
10:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Participants and sponsors will be working in the area from Sula, Montana and Painted Rocks Dam at the south end of the Bitterroot Valley all the way north to Missoula, Montana where the Bitterroot River meets the Clark Fork River. The Bitterroot River flows for over 80 miles and has many public accesses. The more participants helping, the better. Bring your work gloves and be ready to meet and make friends with wonderful people.
End the day at the “Barbecue for Participants” at Angler’s Roost, 4:30 PM
Doc and his wife, Liz, were up again. They have a sweet little place on the middle river and come as often as they can. John fishes by his house or wade fishes his other favorite spots.
Liz enjoys the quiet time and catches up on her reading.
On this day, he is fishing with Jack. What a beautiful day.
Jack fished the Missouri recently and spent a little time in the Headhunters Fly Shop. He enjoyed the owners, Mark Raisler and John Arnold, the staff and all the shop had to offer.
This is the second in a pair of articles on fishing the trico hatch. The first is an overview titled, “The joys and agonies of trico fishing.” It describes it as some of the toughest, most technical angling that one encounters during the season and as some of the most gratifying. Jack Mauer of Wapiti Waters looks forward to trico fishing in August and September because of the challenges and rewards of catching trout during this time.
This article describes Jack’s tips to help you reap the rewards and enjoy better success. Jack has broken his tips into six “P”s– patterns, precision of presentation, patience, persistence, practice, and pulse.
1) Patterns: Having a good trico pattern that will match the hatch is obviously very important. Here is the dilemma. On a typical trico morning trout are on the trico spinner – a spinner imitation is a flat-winged hard to see on the water dry fly which has to be tied fairly sparse. A trico spinner imitation is not only difficult to see, it is not a very good floater. Jack and others have come up with an upright wing parachute tied with a white hackle and a visible antron wing that floats reasonably well. It can be sparsely tied on a 16-20 1X short hook. Unfortunately, over tough educated trout it is the flat winged spinner that will work the best. Jack will change to fresh flies often as these patterns get water-logged after 15 minutes despite a brisk false cast and a shot in the drying crystals.
2) Precision of presentation: You need to have good presentations and that means precision in your casting. No matter how good your pattern is, if it is not placed in front of the feeding trout just right he will not eat it. By just right, Jack means in his lane above his mouth with no drag. This is where having the correct casting angle is paramount. You can be a tournament caster and put the fly on a dime but if the pattern is not cast at the correct angle, it won’t be eaten. Across and down is the technique that lends itself to the most success. In flat, slow moving water casting downstream at an acute 15-20 degree angle will ensure that the trout will see your good pattern before he sees a wad of tippet or your dry fly dragging through the “hold.” It is really easy to have drag on these tiny patterns. The use of a long, fine tippet (3 feet of 6X) can be a benefit but you have to control it while in the air and once it is on the water. The rod tip can help eliminate drag when your fly is on the water by initially creating drag. To do this, you must raise the rod to 10-11 o’clock taking all the slack out of the leader to the fly creating the 15-20 degree angle, then dropping the rod tip and letting the fly do its thing on this long harness. This technique will result in an additional 4-6 inch drift.
You can get away with this “resetting” technique 25-30 feet above the riser without being a tournament caster but it has to be accomplished in a smooth motion. When your fly does start to drag out it is best to let it drag behind your target rather than rip it out of the water to attempt another cast. Remember to strip, strip, strip up line before casting to eliminate noise and surface disturbance.
Brown trout caught in the Big Hole during a trico hatch
Photo by Jack Mauer
Sometimes big fish will feed on trico spinners in shallow riffles at the head of pools. In these situations you can decrease the casting angle (to 20-45 degrees) in this faster water but it really helps to have the sun at your back as well. Many times the fish you are after are moving around within the riffle and with all the reflections and refractions, you need all the help you can get to not spook the fish.
A word about leaders around western Montana: When boat fishing, you can get away with a one piece 9 ½ to 10 foot 5X leader. Once out of the boat while wade-fishing, a 12 foot leader with 2-3 feet of 6X tippet will enable one to fish to risers without putting the trout down so long as the fly line is laid down softly with each cast. Because he wants to lay the fly line down very softly, Jack is a big fan of 4 and 5 weight rods. Some even use a 3 weight here.
Classic trico water, bright day
Photo by Jack Mauer
3 & 4) Persistence and patience: These go hand in hand. It usually takes more than several good drifts to finally get a trout to eat your fly. This does require the utmost in persistence and the patience to wait between casts to let a stubborn trout begin to feed again and cannot be understated. Big selective trout can be extremely rhythmic in their feeding mode, so it does make sense that the timing of your cast is almost as important as the accuracy of delivery. The next dry fly fishing purist book could be entitled “the cadence of trout.” Moral of the story, it doesn’t hurt to observe for a while and not cast. Just wait it out while you observe which lends itself to a little poetry, “to cast or not to cast, that is the question.”
Finally, the hook set itself. Again the word here is patience. Many times Jack has pleaded his “God save the queen” raising of the rod to these words with clients to help slow down their hook sets in order to impale the fish. Because the patterns are tied on small gapped hooks you must be slow and methodical in the hook setting. This is a different hook setting technique than the quick hook set usually associated with nymph and bobber rigs and/or larger dry fly fishing. This technique can’t be learned over night. It requires practice.
5) Practice: Yes, he said practice. It does take practice to get good at anything difficult. To truly master this type of trout fishing it is somewhat synonymous with a great hitter in baseball. There are times when you may go into a slump. You aren’t going to get a hit every time at bat, but your percentage of success will improve with practice.
6) Pulse: The pulse of tricos is affected by weather. The best weather patterns that bring on consistent spinner falls are windless, warm partly sunny days. A stable high pressure dome sitting over the Rockies will get trout into a predictable morning feeding rhythm. A change to cool rainy weather will disrupt your spinner falls and cause a down pulse.
In conclusion, you can be doing everything right, make good presentation, hook a beautiful fish with a nice slow hook set, play him for one long run and then have him shake the hook or break off in a weed bed. This is where the joy can turn to agony. But therein lies the challenge of what trout fishing is all about. Hopefully these tips can help you catch more trout during trico time.
This is the first article in a pair about fly fishing the trico hatch in western Montana. The second is about six tips to improve your success.
Within the fishing season there are times that one really anticipates. For many in western Montana, it is the Skwalla or salmon fly hatches early in the year. These two stonefly hatches are famous for bringing up big fish and they both come at times when you are anxious to fish — spring before high water and right at receding high water. But another hatch later in the year will get trout feeding on top on a consistent daily basis.
The trico mayfly hatch produces spinner falls where trout jam for 2-3 hours in the morning. And, because the trico hatch lasts so many weeks, mid-August through September, one has to devise a strategy to deal with this important time. No other mayfly species is so intense.
The reasons so many surface feeding trout can be found gulping tricos have to do with the slight decrease in the water temperatures of a late summer morning and the hundreds of mayflies on the water. It is a signal to the trout that fall is coming and winter is just around the corner. “We need to stock up,” they are saying. The joy is seeing all these targets. But, despite the sheer number of tricos dancing in the air, loads of spinner falls on the water, and the active pods of sipping trout, the trout can be very difficult to catch during this hatch. The water is flat, the sun bright, and trout see so many naturals. How do you get them to take your imitation? This can be agonizing.
Typically, western Montana’s trout fly fishing and guiding season lasts from mid-March through mid-October making trico season a very significant part. Jack Mauer of Wapiti Waters shares a few tidbits of information and wisdom that he has gained over 25 years of guiding fly fishermen and hopefully it will improve your catch rate. No doubt about it, targeting trout that are coming to the surface and feeding on these tiny aquatic insects requires a little different skill set. The best spinner falls are on partly sunny days. When the light reflects off the water and through the tippet, it will shine like a diamond necklace and alert the fish to you and your dry fly.
Classic trico water on in western Montana
Photo by Merle Ann Loman
You can be doing everything right, make good presentation, hook a beautiful fish with a nice slow hook set, play him for one long run and then have him shake the hook or break off in a weed bed. This is where the joy can turn to agony. But therein lies the challenge of what trout fishing is all about.
This is some of the toughest, most technical angling that one encounters during the season, but it also is some of the most gratifying. A morning of trico fishing is something Jack really looks forward to every year because of the challenges and rewards of catching trout during this time. To reap the rewards yourself read the second article discussing the six “P”s to better success in trico fishing. The six “P”s are patterns, precision of presentation, patience, persistence, practice, and pulse. Here is a link to Jack’s Six “P”s of trico fishing.
