Today was one of the those days. March 15th 2022, Whites Ranch, Paradise Utah. Some of the readers of this blog are undoubtably from Utah and many of you will know about White’s Ranch. It is a private, membership based fishing venue and offers a combination of a meandering stream connected to a few ponds. There are hundreds and hundreds of fish on this small property. In fact they have a hatchery and raise their own rainbow trout. The sheer numbers of fish don’t guarantee success, but they seriously stack the deck in your favor. Lots of fish and big fish is a good thing, and one of the reasons I’m a member. In a lot of ways, it is like the Disneyland of fly fishing. When everything works, you can have a 20-30 fish day there. Even when things don’t work, you can have a decent day getting incidental eats.
One of the variables that White’s Ranch takes out of the fishing equation is finding the fish. They are literally everywhere. Also, if you like big fish, and who doesn’t, they average about 15″-16″, depending on where you place your focus. It is a rare day when I don’t land an 18″ + fish, and frequently land fish over 20″. Think of it as a petri dish for fly fishing experimentation, but know that not everything learned in the lab is fully transferrable to the real world. But today, that was how I approached it. More often than not, it is not a matter of clear “match the hatch” and land a fish on nearly every cast, although I have had days like that. In fact, had my goal been pure numbers, the clear winning combination was a midge nymph and a midge emerger under an indicator. The fish were clearly finding most of their food subsurface and midges were on the menu. If you have read other posts of mine, you know that I nymph fish with an indicator as a last resort. What I learned today is that a dry dropper could have been the second best approach, even with nymphs.
The game plan today was to rig my 3wt Scott G2 for midge dries and my 4wt Scott G2 for soft hackles and leech patterns. Unlike the “real world” like the Provo or the Henry’s Fork where the fish are really tippet shy, at White’s 5.5X is as small as I go and that is what I rigged. I ran straight 4X from the tippet ring.
My primary focus today was two very different areas of the ranch. The first was a small pond and the second was a long run on the stream that usually had rising fish. The pond was first, I tried stripping a frenchie soft hackle I recently tied. I caught a really nice fish that fought great. The soft hackle went cold, mostly because the BWOs are still a couple of weeks out and16 is the smallest soft hackle in my box. So I switched to a midge dry fly. I cast to rising fish but got zero eats and was somewhat puzzled by that. OK, now off to the run. The upper part of the run is a fast tail out, flowing into a slower run. There were a few rising fish, but after some attempts, I made a fly change and still no luck, so I made yet another fly change, and still no luck. The bugs were mostly smaller than size 30, with some occasional larger ones.
Heading back to the pond, I discovered many more rising fish than before. I went back the small midge pattern and got nothing. Then I had an ‘Aha’ moment! It was clear that they were eating in the film or slightly below, so I went to an emerger pattern. The first emerger I tried was not weighted and hung in the film. Still no luck. The second one was an RS2 with a glass bead and sunk very slowly and that was the ticket! I caught three total using this approach and one was the biggest of the day(pic below). In order to detect strikes, I used a painfully slow retrieve, just enough to keep my line tight and that worked great. After the fact, while conferring with my fly fishing friend Jayne, she said “Why didn’t you just tie a dry fly in front and use it as an indicator?” To which I said, “Yeah, you are right, that would have made sense”. My point in bringing all this up is over 20 years of fly fishing you learn a lot and sometimes the recall doesn’t always happen when you want it to.
After the rises stopped, I went back above and did manage a few up there on dry flies, although a couple of the eats happened sub-surface when my fly sank in the turbulence. All good! I also managed a couple on leeches elsewhere on the property. What felt good, was remembering the difference between a rise that is a surface eat and a sub-surface eat and making sure you are presenting the fly where it needs to be in the water column. It was also fulfilling to get fish on dry flies, emergers, soft hackles and streamers(leeches) all in a single day!
