The Hatch Match and Other Musings: A Trout Epiphany

The Summary:

Few are gonna read all of this to get to my real questions. Therefore I am gonna summarize so I can get some answers. I am a newbie trout fly fishing. I had an incredible experience with a fly hatch and trout take in SE New Mexico. I caught several fish through no fault of my own. I now am hooked and have questions about how this truly works. I wanna ask the old hands these questions to be better prepared. How do you know what bugs are hatching? Do you go by the area experience; do ya try and catch some? How do ya know when the hatch will be? Again is it area or experience? Why do the trout ?gang up?? How long does a hatch usually last? How do you know what the trout are taking, that is the fly, the emerger or what? Are there books or lists of what hatches in what area? What about after the hatch. I did not catch anything for about 2 hours after the hatch, are the trout full, tired, both?

The Hatch Match and Other Musings: A Trout Epiphany

The date was Saturday, June 28, 2008. The time was local 7 to 9 am. The place is the Rio Penasco River on Charlie Mulcock?s ranch 54 miles west of Artesia, NM.
The story is this. I am 59 years old and love to fish. Unhappily for my fishing bug, I live in Midland, Texas. Midland is great for my other passion of upland bird, quail hunting, but takes a toll if you fish, water of any kind is 2 to 3 hours away and very subject to drought. I took up fly fishing two years ago because a friend of mine loved it and I thought I should try it. I started lurking on some fly fishing forums and reading all of the FAOL articles.

Did not take long to learn that the name Lefty Kreh means fly casting. So, got the Cabela?s starter kit and Lefty?s videos and literally within minutes, I am a fly caster (please note that although it is impossible to see on an internet post my tongue is firmly in my cheek at this point.

I then bought ?Fly Fishing for Dummies? and tried to learn something. What I learned is that there are more knots and parts to a line than I thought I could master. Bloods, nails, surgeons and more, would I traverse this knotty world. Pretty soon Perfection was not limited to my tying that knot as I could tie a shock leader to a fly line. Progress was everywhere.

Well, as a hooked person ya gotta have gear, right guys! The starter set from Cabelas is OK, but names like Sage, Winston, Tioga, Able and others sneak into your conscious mind. You?re watch the Outdoor Channel and all those dudes have these vests with ?bout 10,000 goodies hang?n off ?em and fly boxes full of a gazillion critters. Pretty staggering, ya go to Cablea?s wish list, load that sucker up with what ya think ya need, then click ?Move to Check Out? and gasp at the total. As a person married in excess of 35 years to the same wonderful woman, but a guy that never fly fished, it is truly impossible to say ?Ah honey, that?s that ole fly rod I?ve had forever?, it aint happenin?, there have been no old fly rods. Needless to say that at this juncture the old adage applies ?That when I die, I hope my wife does not sell my hunting and fishing equipment for what I told her they cost!? I soon had an oak corner rod holder with holes full of aluminum or canvas covered tubes with reels to match.

So, I am watchin? Outdoor Channel and reading American Angler and everyone is catching trout. That?s great, but I live in warm, actually, hot water country. I am also kinda happy with my state as a bass on the fly guy. It turns out thought that through sales and purchases of different oil companies I find myself employed by an outfit that has major producing operations in Artesia, New Mexico. Well Artesia is just a hop, skip and a jump from a place my buddy had be talking about for years, Charlie Mulcock?s ranch on the Rio Penasco. So I had a for real, cold water, western trout stream that I could even fish after work in the summer time.

My buddy and I join Charlie?s and for the first time I am gunna fish for trout. We go in March of 2008 on a beautiful day. The Rio Penasco is a smallish, stream feed river that runs throughout Charlie?s ranch. It is not a wading river as it has a mud bottom. It is beautiful clear and cold water that is never so large that you cannot cast from one bank to the other so not being able to wade is not so bad. The mud bottom precludes natural trout breeding and therefore the trout are stocked. Charlie keeps them in a holding pond year round and therefore while not wild, the fish are not just out of the hatchery.

My first trip is true beginners luck, truly. There is some rising and taking of something going on. I tie on an ?I dunno what? and catch two HUGE trout. Rise stops, tie on a homemade olive bugger and proceed to catch two more HUGE trout. All this catching is within about 10 feet of my initial position. Put on a red San Juan worm, walk five feet and catch a trout, cool, nothing to this. All this action slows, as it had to, and I wind up with one more hours later on a Prince Nymph. Not too shabby for a warm water guy, six big fish. I cannot wait to do it again.

For a variety of reasons, mostly weather and gasp work related I have not gotten back until this Saturday, June 28, 2008. We had been advised that the hatch would come off at about 7:30 am local time. We were there plenty early and both had two rods rigged. I had one rod with my fluorocarbon leaders and buggers and one ready for dry fly action. I caught two on my bugger and then noticed something.

This Saturday morning became my first real experience with ?The Hatch?. It turned out to be an awesome display of God?s marvelous creation. My attention focused on what at first was a smallish cloud of flying insects, remember I am a warm water guy and my mind did not at that time have the alarm bells to signal, ?The Hatch is On?, just sort remarked that ?there?s a bunch o? bugs flyin? around?. That was just about the time that it sounded like several of my Grandson?s were throwing clods of dirt into the Penasco. It did truly look like somebody throwing rocks in the water, but I could not see the rock fall. Finally, I saw the reason for the din. I saw a trout dart from the bottom where he in total camouflage and hit the surface and then in an instant go back to bottom. It hit me, this was ?The Hatch? and it was also ?The Take?.

Fish were literally everywhere hitting the surface.
If I am still capable of sprinting, that is what I did back to the truck for the dry fly rod. I have on one of the only flys I am capable of knowing what it is, I have on a Blue Winged Olive. I dunno what is hatching; all I know is that the stream is boiling with trout taking something off the surface of the water. This is not some polite dance of the fishes, this is a brutal winner take all free-for-all for food. Whatever is on the water these fish are going after it like crazy.

I do not know what is hatching, how can I get the right fly. I clip off the Olive and tie on something small and brown outta the box. Boom, another rod bending smash, much fun, lots of fight. Then it all stops again. I am about to panic, this hatch is not gonna last forever. I have to find what it is they want. How can I do that when I have no idea what they are eating. They are very small and seem to be brown. I go for the only other set of flys that if I catch something, I will know what they are. I had purchased a set of the ?Full Life Cycle of the Pale Morning Dun? from Cabela?s. Open the box and then as all newbies and maybe you experienced guys say to self, self, what?n the hell are we gunna throw. Select the PMD Thorax fly, just cuz really. Tie him on.

Pure joy is many things to many people. Pure joy comes in many forms. My wife, my children, and my beloved Grandchildren have all given me many minutes of pure joy. I am 59 and today PURE JOY is lucking into the fly that seems to be something these fish wanna eat, not eat inhale and then inhale some more. It becomes make a cast and catch a fish. I catch some really, 18? plus, large trout. One is so large he bends my hook straight. I am watching these fish. They are not single fish, there are gangs of trout. One gang hangs out at a slight bend in the river where the bank turns to a steel banks support. Another gang is holding all along this 6 foot stretch of steel retaining wall. Where the wall ends and there is a bush, there is another gang of trout.

This carnival of fish fun continues for 1 ? hours. Me and the fish are exhausted after it is over. You can see it start to stop. The cloud of flys begins to diminish. Then almost imperceptibly the rocks hitting the water also begin to slow. Finally, the air around the stream and the stream itself are quite.

Few are gonna read all of this to get to my real questions. Therefore I am gonna summarize so I can get some answers. I am a newbie trout fly fishing. I had an incredible experience with a fly hatch and trout take in SE New Mexico. I caught several fish through no fault of my own. I now am hooked and have questions about how this truly works. I wanna ask the old hands these questions to be better prepared. How do you know what bugs are hatching? Do you go by the area experience; do ya try and catch some? How do ya know when the hatch will be? Again is it area or experience? Why do the trout ?gang up?? How long does a hatch usually last? How do you know what the trout are taking, that is the fly, the emerger or what? Are there books or lists of what hatches in what area? What about after the hatch. I did not catch anything for about 2 hours after the hatch, are the trout full, tired, both?
I can see why y?all do this. It was truly an experience that you have to partake in to understand. It is God in all his glory in nature!

Mark -

I DID read the whole thing. I must say, I certainly enjoyed your writing about your experience yesterday much more than I did the questions you raised !!

Unfortunately, while this site allows plenty of space for questions like yours, even lots of them, it doesn't allow space for all the answers, if any one person had them, hardly even one question.

Having said that - in most places that trout live in the wild, there is an annual cycle of bugs, with local variations. Here in the Intermountain West, the cycle would go something like midges all year round but with emphasis in the late fall, winter and early spring, blue wing olives starting in late winter until the weather warms up and then again in the late fall, caddis starting around Mother's Day and lasting most of the summer with a big bang in fall with the October Caddis appearing in September, pale morning duns starting to appear in early summer and lasting through late summer, salmonflies ( the BIG ones ) sometime in June or July but usually only for two or three weeks on a given river, maybe a bit earlier or later depending on the location or skwala stones earlier on some rivers but kind of sporadic, golden stones ( big but smaller than the salmonflies ) about the same time as the BIG ones but with a much longer period of hatch, little yellow stones, black stones, brown stones, etc. in different places over the summer, and, of course, the terrestrials with emphasis varying between ants, hoppers, and beetles depending on the kind of environment you're in. Did I mention March Browns in April and maybe May ?? And how many did I forget ?? I'm sure some other folks will help out, and some will have some very different flies for their particular regions, or maybe even smaller locales.

The time of day each kind of fly hatches varies, to some extent, but keep in mind that water temperature is a big factor for a lot of them, and that water temperature is something you can use to guess closely at when a particular kind of fly will emerge and then hatch. Too many variables to get into here, for me, anyway. The extremes might be that midges will hatch in below zero weather since when they come to the surface they are in a microclimate at the surface which may well be several degrees or more above freezing even with the below zero air temps. I fished a spring creek in the mountains a couple years ago in February with air temps well down in the lower teens and was catching bows and brookies with small Griffith's Gnat dry flies. Blue wing olives will hatch in mid day on cold days when the water warms up some. I've seen caddis hatches in mid day and in the evening. In one hundred degree heat, terrestrials landing near the bank of a river cold enough for trout to be active will be history soon enough. So on and so forth.

Whether trout are taking emergers, duns, cripples and spinners is best guessed by the rise form. Books have been written on this subject, lots of them. Swirls just below the surface suggest emergers, as do very aggressive splashy rises where the fish may actually jump totally out of the water. Trout taking duns are usually pretty clear about what they are up to - in a good hatch when the trout are on duns you can see them taking naturals. Not uncommon to see a bubble on the water after that kind of take. Spinners and cripples usually kind of get sipped off the surface - the trout know they aren't going anywhere and can ambush them leisurely. A couple summers ago on the Henry's Fork I scooped out a bunch of stuff with my aquarium net. Two different caddis, several stages of emerging / hatching PMDs plus PMD spinners. Just a lucky guess when I picked up two nice bows on a parachute rusty spinner a few minutes later.

Yes, there are books, and websites, more than you will ever have time to read at your "advanced age," that detail the hatches for every hatch for just about any trout stream / river in the country. One book I always recommend is Dave Whitlock's "Guide to Aquatic Trout Foods - Second Edition" published by the Lyons Press. Something in the low $20's, maybe less on one of the booksellers' sites ?? Well worth what you will pay for it. If that book doesn't jump start your quest for information, you just can't jump.

Sounds like you are stuck, along with the rest of us on this website. Enjoy it.

John

Mark -

Did I mention that the above refers to moving water only ??

Also, we do get some drakes - gray, brown and green. There are some gray and brown drakes hatching on the South Fork and the Henry's Fork right now. Don't know much about that hatch because it usually happens on water that I don't fish at the time of year it is happening.

We get a Western Green Drake on one of my favorite mountain streams, from mid August to mid September, maybe a bit sooner or later depending on the weather patterns for a particular year. You can almost set your watch to 1:30 p.m. when the fish start rising for the emergers and some duns. It shuts off almost completely around 3:30 on most days, but that leaves a couple hours of outstanding fishing. Big insects for big wild, native cutthroat on a beautiful, small mountain stream.

It is sad in a way, and it is humorous in a way, to see folks leaving that stream when walking in at 1:00 and hear them complain about what a lousy trout stream it is. If they only knew ??!!

We also get a hexagenia hatch in some places, but again it is a hatch that I just don't happen to fish. I will say that the hex is a BIG and BEAUTIFUL mayfly - probably the biggest and and most beautiful that I've seen.

John

Hey Mark- It sounds like you're having fun, and you've asked a lot of great questions. John has given you a great crash course in "hatchology".

The web is a great place to find info, and you'll find a lot of the answers by looking at the "Not Quite Entomology" here on FOAL for a good easy to read article on understanding and identifying different aquatic insects that appear on trout waters, their life cycles and how to fish them.

If you want to really go crazy, check out www.troutnut.com
It's got a lot of great photos and tons of info.

But here's a generic "Hatch Chart" for western rivers to get you started. Many of the more famous rivers have their own hatch charts on the web

http://www.orvis.com/intro.asp?dir_id=758&subject=253

It'll give you a very general idea of different things you're likely to see, and imitations for different stages of the life cycle. Of course this chart covers a wide area. Your local streams may have other things that are not on this list. Streams at lower elevations and/or further south might hatch a little sooner (1-3 weeks or so) than the same water further north or at higher elevations since it's often temperature dependent, but the relationship between the hatches tends to remain the same, in that there is a progression throughout the season of stuff that hatches early, mid season and late season, so they become somewhat predictable from year to year.

But your best source of info on a particular piece of water will be a local fly shop. It's always worth stopping in and buying a few flies, and hopefully getting a sense of what has been hatching. Many shops should also have hatch charts for their home waters which are really helpful. If you can get your hands on one that would be great, because you can do a little online research between trips on each hatch- for example some prefer mornings, some afternoons, some evenings to emerge. For example if you know a hatch typically comes off in mid afternoon, you might start off with a nymph early morning, switch to an emerger mid morning, hopefully catch the duns hatching with a dry mid-afternoon, and then a spinner pattern in the evening.

I think most would agree that in terms of "matching a hatch" the most important thing is presentation--- the ability to cast and present a fly to a fish without drag so it looks like it's floating naturally with the current. Next in importance would be size, followed by , shade (dark medium light), profile and then color. So if you don't have a perfect match in your fly box, pick the one closest in size and shade.

As far as a how long a hatch lasts, and things suddenly shutting down, I think it's part of a pretty amazing strategy evolved over a bazillion years. Hatching all at once gives the insects a better chance of getting past the trout instead of being picked off one by one,and getting into the air and finding a mate. At the same time, all that activity is worthwhile for a trout to leave the safety of the bottom to fight current to get a good meal if there's a lot of them. Once the hatch is over, trout will retreat to safety and not expend as much energy fighting current for what would be a just a small tidbit if there is not many of them floating by.

Hope this helps!

peregrines

John and peregrines thanks for the help. I have alot to learn on insects and trout. Got to go on the 4th and a week later it was different. Caught just as many fish, but a different hatch and different take. This is FUN stuff!

http://www.flyanglersonline.com/features/nqento/For an easy and inexpensive start on insects try this

Quote:

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Few are gonna read all of this to get to my real questions.

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Then they will miss some great story telling.

Man that is a great story, and skillfully told. I love the "just cause" choice, I am very familiar with that form of scientific reasoning!!!!! I have fished Charlie's place once and while I didn't catch as many or as big as you did, we caught fish, some close to 20" on dries. It was on the fourth of July weekend a few years ago, and there was a "cottonwood hatch" going on. Glad to see you have done well there. Have you hunted his place? Looks like he has some giant mule deer.
John Scott, very informative post. Appreciate it.
Dustin in Weatherford