I was fly fishing the other day. It was a beautiful afternoon, sunny and warm, at least by January standards. Warm enough, actually, that I anticipated a blue-winged olive hatch. But the bugs never came.
Until recently bird hunting has distracted me from the river. Chukar season lasts just a few more days, however, so I broke out my nymphing gear.
It’s just as well. I don’t know where chukar go this time of year. They’re not in their usual haunts. I suspect they’ve moved downhill, to the open, bare slopes scoured clear of snow by the wind. On the sagebrush benches where I usually find birds, all the wind-driven snow has gathered in drifts. The birds aren’t where they’re supposed to be.
The trout are. They are finning in the deep pools of the local tailwater, just off the shelves where water flows through sunlit riffles then drops off into the deeper water. The current carries a variety of bugs that get dislodged in the faster water. There are blue-winged olive nymphs of course. Caddisfly larvae as well, judging by the cases that cover all the river salad I snag on my nymph drifts. In early spring, before high water, the swarms of caddis will be so thick along the river that you inhale a few with every breath.
But the main winter bug around here is the midge. These little guys are often too small as adults to imitate with dry flies. But as larvae they are numerous. Tiny, but numerous.
And I guess that’s the rub. There are so many midge larvae drifting in the current that the fish can’t help themselves. The larvae are tiny. I was using a No. 18 hook to imitate them the other day, but still, drift after drift, the fish-producing fly was that tiny chironomid.
The first fish of the day was a 15-inch or so cutthroat, fat around the waste from the winter smorgasbord. That cuttie was caught by my daughter. She loves to fish, though her attention can wane once we get a photo posted on Instagram. For as long as I’ve practiced catch-and-release the standard was that a fish wasn’t caught until it’s brought to the net. Any fish that managed to throw a hook before full capture didn’t really count.
Anglers may joke about the “long release,” but every fish that gets away a little too soon still stings.
This younger generation (I get a kick out of writing that) has a different standard: a fish isn’t caught until it appears on social media. Sometimes nothing else really matters. On this day, once that nice cuttie went digital the kid was ready to do other things. I kept her attention a little longer when I had to hand off my rod so she could land a fish after it ran me around a boulder and I couldn’t follow. That resulted in one of my favorite fish photos of all time: a two-person, one trout selfie.
Eventually she left to warm up in the truck. I had the river to myself except one other angler who stood in the current stripping streamers in search of a trophy. He wasn’t having much success.
Then I latched onto what felt like the biggest fish of the day. It bulldogged me for a bit, holding deep in the current. I eventually worked it off the bottom and as it broke the surface I could tell it was a brown, maybe 18 inches. In the net I saw that once again the chironomid had done the trick. I slipped that tiny fly from the big male’s hooked jaw, and as I prepared to release it, looked around to see if my daughter had returned to get a glimpse of my trophy.
She was nowhere in sight, but the streamer dude gave me a hearty thumbs up.