High Sierra Trout
Dry fly action
Today was another cool, cloudy, windy day on the Truckee River. These conditions sparked an awesome mayfly hatch all afternoon long. The first spot I went to had a few risers but I passed them up because I had a nymph rig on and wanted to fish some deeper water. After I fished up through the run without any luck I tied on a dry and started to make my way down to the pod of risers, but a guy had materialized from the bushes and was eyeing my fish. I went down and talked to him as he tied on a BWO, he turned out to be a nice guy who was born and raised in Reno and had lots of knowledge to share about the Truckee. As we chatted he missed a few strikes and landed a ten inch rainbow. There was a loose pod of about 15 fish that were steadily rising to the numerous mayflies drifting by. When the sun would make an appearance the rises would stop, but as soon as another cloud obscured its light they would resume their feeding. After about 30 minutes he decided to head up to a deep hole for a chance at a big fish on a streamer so I took over on the risers. By that time there were only a few fish rising, I hooked two and lost them both. Rather than waiting around for the fish to start rising again I headed up to the dam hole to mess around with the risers up there. I started off fishing from a narrow catwalk just below the spillway (pictured below). This allowed me to get pretty close to the fish while staying low and without disturbing the water.
Good spot to cast from
I started casting and missed a few strikes early on, then went a while without any action. I brought my leader down to 7X, tied on a smaller fly and immediately started catching lots of fish (pictured below).
I had to constantly change flies because after a few fish they would get wise to my tricks. When the sun went down the wind picked up and blew all the bugs away, but there were still a few risers around. I decided to switch to a soft hackle in order to cover some more water. I would cast it out and let it dead drift until it started to drag and then I stripped back in with short, quick strips. I caught two fish on the drift and three on the strip before I broke the fly off on a nice fish. I tried a bird’s nest next and immediately caught the pretty little rainbow pictured below.
Pretty little bow
Darkness was quickly closing in so I called it a day and headed home. The quantity of rising fish has been great the last few days, the Truckee is usually pretty stingy with rising fish and has been unusually generous.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
