I finally got a chance to get out and do some angling after a week long plus hiatus away from the stream. I fished the Whitewater area mid-morning through the afternoon hours and had a super day. I went after some brookies in the morning (kudos again to the Hiawatha Chapter’s work on upper Crow Spring) with some small buggers and Black Wets.
After that I hit a different branch of the WW and ran into some decent Light Hendrickson action. I nymphed with mixed success early on and then switched to not one but two dries: a regular thorax hackled dry with a white poly pro post (floats like a cork) and the second fly was a modified dry/wet tied on a curved scud hook with an antron tail and some gray swiss straw wings and a poly post with hackle. Fish hammered both patterns equally well, including three or four fish in that 13-15 inch class. The hatch relaly got going around 1:30 and petered out a bit by 3:30. I didn’t stay late enough to see if it picked up again, but according to Wayne Bartz, who was also fishing the same stretch of water, the LH hatch as been going a bit later in the afternoon into the evening hours.
The hatch wasn’t full bore like I’ve seen it in the past, but the fish were looking up and keying on dries, so it wasn’t necessarily a case of casting to specific rising fish. However, when you’re catching 13-15 inch fish on dries, who really cares?