weird day on the stream.

[deon]

well, lets face it, not every day is a good day, on the water all though i did have fun. i have been fishing the same water for the past year. have caught a few trout. yesterday i got out to the stream at about 600 by the time i was on the water. no big hatches i could see a few bwo's here but seen a few swirls in the pool, so i tried on a bwo emerger. well after two hours of fishin and triing everything i had in my box. stones,princes,bwo's,hares ear, and pheasant tails, and i also tried some caddis and everything i dint have one bite but i had a giant (probably a nice brown) jump 35 feet away. i called it break time around 8 got some breakfast, and then my buddy met me out there around 9 30 ish. right off the bat i realize that there are midges, bwo's, caddis, and tons of baetis. i litterly threw my fly box at them. every fly i had. i was running 3 flies in one point about my strike indicator at one point in a pool. meanwhile my buddy wont switch up his stone fly nymph. at around 2 30 ish we took a break and re thought through everything. and he decided he was going to fish streamers. he only has one streamer, a muddler minnow i gave him, i of course forgot my streamer box. i decided i was going to go back to nymohing maybe run a huge dry on top with a little hymph on the bottom. i hit one pool he hits a pool that i have always thought was great and would hold fish but never caught one. well around 3 10 less then 5 minutes on the water i hear him say, deon i got one on, so i started booking down the stream, i was happy thinkin now they are going to start. it was a beautiful native brookie, about 10 or 11 inches. so now i have a name for the pool. that was all we caught except a few creek chubs. all that worked was a streamer we seen a few fish rise but man were there just tons of hatches. yet they werent biting the insects has this every happened to you guys?

[JohnScott]

... to me and probably everyone else who has read or will read this thread.

I've never fished in your neck of the woods, but I have a vague recollection that someone talked about a similar situation recently where the fish were not keyed on the hatching insections, but on the chubs which were hitting the hatch. Maybe that is what was happening and why you caught the chubs and only one trout on a streamer which was taken as a chub.

Just something to keep in mind, by the way. Sometimes the most effective way to fish to rising trouts during a hatch is to run a baitfish style streamer through the rising fish high in the water column. The reason it works ( Art Lee wrote an article on this technique for Fly Fisherman magazine about 25 years ago ) is that the baitfish are feeding on the insects near the surface and the trouts, when they get the opportunity, snack on the baitfish rather than the bugs. I've fished a good number of hatches this way on streams and rivers in the Intermountain West with some great results, both for quantity and quality of trouts taken with the streamers.

Something else you might try, if the fish are feeding in wadable water. Walk out in the middle of where they are feeding and scoop up everything you can on and just under the surface. That should give you some ideas about the kinds of flies that will work. Kind of screws up the fishing temporarily, but it can be an invaluable "waste" of fishing time.

John