24th Day of Fly Fishing – June 10th, 2026, Ashton, ID
The green drake hatch on the Henry’s Fork (HF) of the Snake River is legendary! It is when the big fish rise to eat the big bugs. It brings fishermen out from all over Idaho, surrounding states and sometimes other countries. As with many other hatches, they start downstream like in Rexburg, working their way up through St. Anthony and Ashton and ultimately the Ranch and Island Park. It is always a mystery as to when and where, which translates into being in the right place at the right time.
This year, we all knew the hatch was going to be early. I’ve hit the drake hatch on two other occasions and each time by chance my friend Bryson was along. The first time was incredible! We had an hour and a half of mayhem, landing big fish from the drift boat, one after the next, for a solid hour and a half. We each boated 12-15 fish in the timeframe. That day is still in my top 20 of all time. The second time was with Reid and Bryson. The hatch that day was very short lived and the fish preferred the emerger over the dry that day. On both of those those occasions, the hatches were right around the 20th of June, give or take a day or two. This year, with the recoed low snow pack and warm spring, all of the hatches have been early. The Mother’s Day caddis hatch on the HF was two weeks before Mother’s Day!
This year, it was a guy at my favorite local shop, World Cast Anglers, who tipped me off. He leaned forward and whispered “Drakes have been hatching on the lower Henry’s Fork”. Well, that was all it took to get me excited!
On this day, I had planned to take John, who was rehabbing a knee replacement and also Nick, who was visiting from the Western Rivers fly shop in SLC. Nick and I go way back, chatting at the shop and meeting at fly fishing shows, but we hadn’t fished together before. Because of John’s sensitive knee, his plan was to fish from the boat, where as Nick and I planned to wade.
John and I met Nick at the ramp and we decided to self shuttle which would give us more flexibility in case we needed to move to a different location. The wind was already strong and as we were launching it just got heavier and heavier. In fact, the wind was so strong that other rigs were pulling up to the ramp and leaving. It turns out, we were the last boat to launch that day!
The winds just continued to pick up in intensity. 25mph was the steady wind and gusts well over 30. Also, I was having serious trouble maneuvering the boat. Nick spotted a riffle and we decided to anchor up and work the riffle and the tail out. It was around noon when we began working the water and by 1pm, the wind had increased again, now up to 30mph steady and 35+ gusts. At this point, we also realized that no other boats had launched after us, plus the few boats that launched before us were far ahead. So….. we had the river to ourselves, but we were also questioning our sanity. Thankfully it was an upstream wind, so it helped us to get longer drifts, but we were still pretty miserable.
The action was slow to start with an occasional caddis eat, so we fished the caddis and got a couple of smaller fish. Nick got a few on soft hackles up in the riffle. Then the clouds began to move in and the wind gusts at that point were insane, however the dark skies did get the drake hatch going around 2pm, although it was slow to start and not many fish were engaged.
At 3pm, we had rain and lightning, literally directly overhead so we donned our rain jackets, pulled the boat in close to the bank and huddled until the rain passed. When it was safe to return to our fishing spots, we noticed that the drake hatch had really intensified and between us we had fifty heads coming up on a regular basis, rising to the drakes which were now in full-on hatch mode.
The true blessing of this day was that the winds steadily decreased over the next hour, even as the drake hatch intensified and remaining clouds kept the hatch going. Since John was fishing from the boat, we knew he needed to be positioned. Nick pulled the boat up 50 feet or so to where the action was and then he headed to his spot downstream. (Below you can see Nick holding the boat for John). At this point the skies had changed to partly cloudy, but you can see the rough water behind NIck. The wind was kicking up white caps and it was really rough.
I took over boat positioning so that John could target specific fish and have them in range. He promptly hooked three fish and one was rather large, so I grabbed the net to help out. It was crazy, holding the boat with one hand and trying to net the fish with the other. After the third fish, I realized John was getting way ahead of me with the fishing. I also came to realize that I could anchor the boat in a spot where he had multiple targets.
At this point, I still had not rigged a rod, so John handed me his and I promptly hooked and landed three fish. It was amazing! Immediately after landing the third fish, I handed John his rod back and rigged my own, my 4wt Scott G2 and put on a drake pattern similar to a klinkhammer. One observation: during a heavy hatch like the one we had, we noticed that the fish were not picky about the pattern. John, Nick and I each chose a very different fly. All were size ten and were green. The fly I chose worked incredibly well as I hooked and landed a few more fish. We were only getting occasional refusals. Note that in the shot below, the water had smoothed out a lot.
The drake hatch slowed around 5pm and the clouds had dispersed as well. John started drifting a soft hackle at that point, right off the back of the boat and managed another three fish. One was a magnificent brown!
At 6pm things were quiet and we decided to work our way downstream. Nick had a streamer on and got a few bumps. John had a nymph rig and he came up empty as well.
It was one of those days where we launched and at the same time we were questioning our sanity, at least for the first couple of hours, but after the heavy rain clouds passed over and the wind died, we ended up with an incredible day! John had over 10 fish and I believe Nick was over 10 as well. Nick lost a huge fish at his feet, but for awhile he was wading without a net. I ended up with 8, but at least half of all of our fish were quality fish in the 16″+ range.
A day that got off to a really nasty start but ended oh so well!
