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    The Salmonfly: Guide to the Dream Hatch of the West
    The Salmonfly: Guide to the Dream Hatch of the West
    The Salmonfly: Guide to the Dream Hatch of the West
    Ebook215 pages1 hour

    The Salmonfly: Guide to the Dream Hatch of the West

    By Skip Morris

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The complete guide to fly fishing one of North America's most legendary insect hatches--the Salmonfly.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStackpole Books
    Release dateJan 15, 2015
    ISBN9780811761970
    The Salmonfly: Guide to the Dream Hatch of the West

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      Book preview

      The Salmonfly - Skip Morris

      illustrations.

      Introduction

      Here’s the proof you’re neither a poser nor a dabbler but a true fly fisher: you ache to fish the Salmonfly hatch. How could a true fly fisher resist huge fluttering insects crashing onto rivers to disappear down the dark caverns of big trout’s open jaws? Can’t be done. Impossible. (Impossible for me anyway—greetings fellow true fly fisher.)

      Does trout-river fly fishing get more exciting than this? I doubt it. The Salmonfly is the biggest insect in most of the rivers it inhabits. And after a couple of years spent living as an armored-looking trout entrée under quick currents, it presents trout and fly fishers alike with a glorious gift: it sprouts wings and then flies and clambers around its home river, often tumbling into the water. Picture it: a huge helpless insect bobbing down the river, that stout body perhaps as long as the first two joints of your finger, begging even the largest trout to attack.

      The snag lies in getting the timing right for the hatch and then doing the right things—a genuinely tricky proposition. You can spend days during a good hatch catching very little. Many fly fishers do. I have. Sure, it’s fun watching the big insects scamper around tree trunks and sail by on fluttering wings, but if that’s all you get, it’s small consolation when you came expecting mythical action on dry flies that remind you of chunky bass bugs. So you need a comprehensive plan of attack, complete with all the tricks and tactics that can shift the battle in your favor when the Salmonflies or the weather or the river or all three are on the defensive. This little book contains that plan.

      I’ll even tell you when you should ignore those nearly irresistible giant bugs, because sometimes even at the peak of the Salmonfly hatch you’ll catch far more trout on a size 20 midge than a size 6 Stimulator—yes, knowing when to ignore the Salmonfly hatch is valuable knowledge.

      I’ll tell you, too, all about another big stonefly that creates all kinds of great fishing right around Salmonfly time yet—remarkably!—remains little-known. But despite the Salmonfly’s caveats and catches, when those great insects are drifting by and the trout are all about grabbing them, you can live a fly fisher’s dream. So welcome, fellow true fly fisher, to that dream bug, the magnificent Salmonfly.

      Let’s step around the legend to look at the Salmonfly in a clinical way: its form, habits, habitat—a brief introductory profile of the great insect. For you scientific-Latin fans, the Salmonfly is Pteronarcys californica .

      Form: The Nymph

      Length: 1 to almost 2½ inches, not including tails and antennae. Hook sizes for imitations: 8 to 2.

      Body: the rear half, which is called the abdomen, is a stout cylinder; the front half, the thorax, continues at about the same thickness as the abdomen with three pointy shields up its back. (The first shield behind the head is just for show. The next two are wing pads containing the immature wings.) Fly fishers typically call wing pads, or anything resembling them, wing cases.

      Legs: six, chunkier than most aquatic-insect legs, but still slender.

      Antennae: two, longish.

      Tails: two, noticeably thicker than the antennae, and short.

      Head: wide, though even including the eyes, not quite so wide as the thorax.

      Gills: feathery and spread along the underside of the thorax and back a little under the abdomen.

      Coloring: brown to black on top (usually blackish, in my experience). This coloring spreads over the back and sides of the insect from the tails to the antennae, with the legs, wing pads, abdomen, and thorax all a consistent dark color.

      What Trout See. To both fly fisher and trout, a Salmonfly nymph looks the same (although you do need to see the brown or tan of the underside in the photo on the left to understand the whole effect). That’s because the creature is down in the trout’s submerged world—the trout gets a full 360-degree view.

      A Salmonfly adult? That’s different. The fly fisher sees the insect from a top view or perhaps from the side—all dark coloring. A trout, however, sees the underside of the insect with that brushstroke of pinkish or reddish orange. The dark legs extending from the sides of the thorax are significant. But although edges of the wings and the antennae and tails are also visible, they play minor roles overall.

      It always serves the fly fisher to understand how trout see an insect.

      The underside is different; it’s usually a sort of tan or light brown through the abdomen and thorax, a bar of quiet colors up the belly of the beast. Gills are whitish or gray. Note that these colors vary somewhat from river to river, region to region.

      Form: The Adult

      Length: 1 to almost 2½ inches, not including tails, wings, and antennae. Hook sizes for imitations: 8 to 2.

      Body: very similar body shape to the nymph, but with wings instead of wing cases.

      Wings: four, but they look like two (almost one) when folded back at rest, lying down flat over the body.

      Legs: six, like the nymph’s, and blackish.

      Antennae: two, longish (like the nymph’s antennae)

      Here’s how an adult Salmonfly looks from underwater after it’s spent enough time on the river for its abdomen to sink and its wings to lie against the water’s surface. For a while after hitting the water, a Salmonfly (or another big stonefly we’ll get to) floats higher than this, the underside of the insect’s body pressing on or just through and the legs piercing the water’s surface, the wings above it usually folded or flapping.

      A trout sees the underside of a river’s surface almost as a mirror—so all he first sees of a floating insect is what penetrates that mirror. Within this broad ceiling that reflects the riverbed, a little window lies directly above a trout’s eyes. This is the trout’s only chance to see outside the water. A trout will typically see a big stone—or your fly—as just body and legs or, if the insect’s been awash for a while, he’ll see it largely submerged as in the photograph above—either way, the trout can view only the parts of the insect that touch or penetrate the water’s surface, up until the last moment before he takes it. This is why I prefer dry flies that rest their bodies down on the water rather than riding high on hackle points—the trout gets the best look at the fly this way, because there’s more to catch the trout’s eye, and the fly convincingly imitates the real stonefly’s posture on the river.

      When the insect eventually drifts over the trout, every aspect of that fly both in and out of the water comes into plain view—but a trout normally decides whether or not it’s interested in some floating creature well before it floats right overhead. If you want your fly to look like a real Salmonfly when the trout’s making his decision, prefer a fly that settles its belly down on the water like just another stonefly, displaying its stout self below the water’s surface as an invitation. ARLEN THOMASON

      Tails: two, noticeably thicker than the antennae and short (like the nymph’s tails).

      Head: wide, though even including eyes, not quite so wide as the thorax (same as the nymph’s head).

      Gills: just some remnants, and they’re no longer functional or noticeable.

      Coloring: pretty much the same brown to black coloring as the nymph along the back and sides, and for the legs, tails, and antennae. The underside, however, is a pinkish or reddish orange—the color of some salmon flesh, for which the insect was named. There is normally a band of orange behind the head. The wings are brown. Just as it does with the nymph, coloring of the adult varies somewhat from river to river, region to region.

      Life Cycle

      Nearly all stoneflies, from the tiny black winter stone to the great Salmonfly and all the others between, live the life that follows with only minor variations.

      A Salmonfly begins life as a fertilized egg, dropped on the water by a female adult Salmonfly. The egg settles down through the currents to the riverbed. Gradually this egg matures to a tiny nymph.

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