June is an odd month. As it warms up it feels like summer, and summer means fishing. But in June rivers in the Northern Rockies are usually high, and sometimes the color of chocolate milk. That’s not exactly ideal if your goal is to catch fish.
And that’s always the goal.
Rivers usually round into shape by the end of the month. In the meantime, fly fishers have to concentrate on lakes. There the fly fishing is similar, but also very different. Of course there’s casting and bugs and fish, but the water isn’t moving, and some of the bugs are nothing like those on rivers.
The other day I fished a lake that is stocked with fingerling trout and then managed for trophy fish through strict catch-and-release regs. The wind was ripping when I arrived, and I almost went home. But I had a couple of cold beverages in the cooler so I decided to wait it out.
While the wind was still howling I walked the shoreline. In tall grass along the dam I noticed what looked like blue seed heads topping the waving stalks. And then some of the seed heads began to fly away as I approached.
Damselflies.
Damsels are a trout staple on still water in the early summer. You will find them near moving water as well, but never in the numbers like those I had seen on the dam. The bugs were thick, and each damsel was just about the right size for a nice trout to inhale.
You can fish with adult damselfly patterns as you would any other dry fly, but usually I don’t think that’s the best approach. Fishing nymphs below the surface, sometimes very deep with sinking lines, is the most productive method. The nymphs are an even bigger chunk of protein than the adults and they swim with a seductive side-to-side swaying motion that no red-blooded American trout can resist.
Since damselfly nymphs swim with that slow undulation, ripping imitations through the water like a terrified baitfish isn’t going to result in many strikes. I’ve sometimes even fished them from a drifting float tube on a sinking line, trolling essentially. You don’t really retrieve the fly, so much as gently jig it as you drift.
The damselflies will let you know when it’s a good time to fish nymphs as the naturals need to grip something solid to crawl out of the water. Wading anglers and float tubes apparently fit the bill. I’ve watched damsels climb out of the water onto my tube and hatch as I’ve fished. It’s a cool thing to watch.
Damsel nymphs are longer and more slender than mayflies. Tan and pale green are the most common colors and the flies are often tied on short-shanked hooks so the extended bodies can sway like naturals.
Green streamer patterns also work. I used to fish an Olive Matuka on Crowley Lake in the Eastern Sierra, where that fly imitated the Sacramento perch that were the favored forage of big trout. We’d catch fish on that pattern all the time, and generally assumed our flies were imitating the perch. That was until the day a damselfly nymph swam by my tube as I stripped in my streamer. The resemblance was striking.
Back at the lake I was rewarded early in the evening when the wind finally laid down. I had maybe an hour of decent conditions to fish.
I didn’t get any trout on the nymphs this time, but they did fall for damsel dries. One fish hit the dry as I was stripping it in to change out to another pattern. The blue foam-bodied dry was chugging across the surface like a tiny bass popper when the trout hit.
I guess that fish thought it was a natural trying to escape the clingy grip of the surface film. Trout do crazy stuff like that all the time.