I returned recently from one of my weekend tours of the Sierras here in CA. I live in the LA area and travelled north up the eastern side of the Sierras and then west through Yosemite and back home going south on the western side fishing as many of my favorite spots along the way as I could.

When I got to the Merced River, There was a prolific number of cased Caddis crawling all over the bottom. I tried for several hours to coax a trout to take several flies including some that imitated cased cddis crawlers and I only finally succeeded in the late afternoon. I ended up catching only one pretty large (for my usual catch) 14 inch rainbow only after two earlier strikes, both braking me off almost instantly. All of this action was on dries.

I attempted it again the next morning and was skunked and the crawlers were everywhere.

Two observations I made are:

Its tough to entice the fish to eat a fake fly when they can seemingly eat as many of these rock crawlers with no real effort.

The fish have grown enormously since mid summer when I caught larger numbers of considerably smaller fish.

Does anyone know if this year's emergence of caddis is more than in other years? I immediately consulted one of my favorite texts on the subject (The Sierra Trout Guide reference by Ralph Cutter). The author describes a certain variety of caddis on the western slopes. I am anxious to see these flies working the water when the huge numbers deposit there eggs. I will start tying adult Caddis flies and be at the ready. By then the fish may be even bigger.