Day 16 on the water – April 20th
Looking for BWO’s and not finding any. Spring in the Tetons has been mostly cool and very windy. Rain and snow mix. The fishing crowd has been praying for more of this. The snowpack melted significantly during warmer days in March and so a cool spring and more water, frozen or liquid is a good thing!
The timing of this outing is a bit dicey only because the rainbows and cutthroats are just finishing up with their spawn. I did not check the redds, but I’m guessing the girls were still on them.
My daughter coined the phrase above when she was a young girl and it has stuck with me ever since. Frequently, the weather apps are just plain wrong! Of course if the wind gauge is in town, it is not likely to reflect what is happening on the water. Wednesday was one of those days. A steady 20mph and gusts over 30. Yikes!
Got on the water and hoping for a hatch. Nothing! Nothing all day long! So I decided to nymph. Found a good tail-out with a seam and tied on a black and purple Pat’s Rubber legs and a pheasant tail soft hackle. My thought process was the big stoneflies, salmon flies and golden stones hatch in May and June and so the nymphs should be on the crawl right now. The black/purplish bug was a better salmon.fly imitation due to its dark coloring. The pheasant tail is a great searching fly for all things baetis, but in a size 14 it is a perfect match for the March brown. It turns out the first fish preferred the pheasant tail nymph, over the Big Mac!
Finding fish and getting eats proved a bit challenging throughout the day and that hatch never did materialize. No bugs around at all actually, but given the steady winds, that was not surprising either. Later in the day, I decided that the black/purple Pat’s was not cutting it and I changed it for a traditional tobacco/brown version. Leaving the pheasant tail on as a control. I worked the same run again and this time got a nice rainbow, this time on the traditional Pat’s, the coloring of which comes closer to the golden stone, but really it is just an excellent stonefly imitation. I also fooled around swinging soft hackles, but no takers.
So it was a. two fish day, a windy day, but any day on the water is a good day.
