Whitewater 7/25

I had the morning to angle a bit so I headed to the Whitewater area. First stop was the North Branch, and it was still a bit off color from the rains over a week a go. It was good nymphing/bugger water as I caught fish on the Black Wet, Prince Nymphs, cdc emergers, black buggers, olive PT’s, and beadhead PT’s. I tried an assortment of flies and all worked with marginal success. There were a few tricos around and I caught a few browns on trico spinners (#22).

After that I switched gears and headed to the wide open meadow surroundings of the Middle Branch. Caught a few nice brookies and a few nice browns on a Madame X with a Black Wet Fly dropper.

Trico numbers have been bbetter on teh South Branch thatn the North. I’m not sure if the hatch will get better on the North Branch, just thought I’d relate what I saw. There were a few hoppers around today and with some wind, they seemed like a logical choice to fish. Hopefully, trout will start keying on hopper patterns in the the next few weeks.

i fished whitewater for a couple hours this morning and didn’t have the best of luck . i tried all 3 branches and all were a little low and crystal clear. certainly not the best conditions for fishing, but still managable. i ended up catching only 3 trout, all out of the middle branch and all caught on a bitch creek. the biggest fish was around 12-13″. kind of a slow morning, but i least i didn’t get the skunk .

Bitch Creek the nymph or Bitch Creek the streamer pattern? They’re nice flies and all, but I’m not sure I would have used that as my staple fly of choice. This time of year fly fishing can be a bit of a mystery if you don’t have a plan. It’s pretty obvious that tricos and terrestrials are two of the main food sources. Stick to smaller nymphs like standard PT’s and Hare’s Ears in #16 or so. You can’t get away fishing the same flies that you maybe had luck on earlier inteh year. The reality is that most of the aquatic insects right now aren’t very big, thus you should downsize your presentations as well. Most of the fish I caught on Friday were right up in the riffle heads if they weren’t in the slack water lazily sucking down trico spinners.

As for stream depth, they may be a little down due to lack of precipitation throughout the summer, but I would say they aren’t overly low considering the time of year. In some streams I’ve seen, the depth has come up due to instream aquatic plant growth.

sorry for the somewhat tardy reply D.A., i’ve been up on the rainy river for the last week or so .

anyway, i was using a bitch creek nymph, not a streamer. earlier in the day i had been fishing with my old reliable PT nymph, but i didn’t catch anything on it. this kind of through me for a loop, it has been a looooooong time since i haven’t been able to catch fish on a PT. i didn’t really no what i should try next, then i rememberd you saying something about hopper patterns. i don’t have any actual hoppers but i thought a bitch creek somewhat resembled one (i’m not sure what they’re really supposed to be ). i was getting a few strikes on it but had a tough time hooking the fish with the larger size fly. at least it got me some action.