Wanted: A Blue Winged Olive Hatch

A wild brown that took a BWO imitation.

It's that time of year when the Blue Winged Olive hatch should be on.  I spent Sunday seeking the hatch but did not find it.  I drove around to Six Mile Gap on the Upper North Platte and discovered it was too muddy to fish.  Maybe not too muddy, but muddier that I wanted to deal with.  Lesson learned: check the N. Platte at the State Line Ranch bridge before driving another 12 miles north to six mile gap.  The  muddy run off was from a snow storm that had hit the N. Platte River Valley but did not leave us a drop of snow on the other side of the Snowy Range.  I drove back to fish the Laramie River not far from my home.  The ice is off but the water is clear and low. These are not the easiest conditions for fishing there.  The Laramie is a wild brown trout fishery and can offer fantastic fishing - but just as often, for me anyway, it can be a bust.  In fact, I can not think of another river that has fished as inconsistently for me as the Laramie.

The day was cool and intermittently overcast with fast scudding clouds which occasionally dropped a mixture of rain and sleet and sometimes a rush of snow which was gone in another minute. Textbook conditions for a Spring Baetis hatch.  The Blue Winged Olives are the first mayflies to hatch in the season.  They are magnificent little mayflies with bluish gray wings and olive/brown bodies.  Unfortunately, the hatch was not to be.

I did have a good afternoon.  I caught six (or seven?) beautiful wild brown trout in a bit more than three hours. The largest (shown above) was just under 18" but the fish were more commonly around 14".  All but two of the fish took a WD40 tied on a size 18 DaiRiki #135 hook.  I've been tying the WD40 with a wood duck tail and a body of 70 denier olive/brown UTC thread. Compared to the old standard Uni-thread the UTC thread colors are both nuanced and rich. The thorax is dubbed with SLF Spikey Dubbing in the Natural Fox color.  The wing case is black Holo Tinsel.  The distinctive thing about the WD40 is the oversize "globular" thorax.   Of the two fish that did not take the WD40, one fancied a skinny orange rock worm and another took a gold bead caddis.  I have to say that every time I brought one in on the WD40 I was surprised to see the fish had not taken the more colorful fly of the pair.  The BWO's may not have been hatching but the fish seem keyed into a good imitation of the BWO nymph/emerger.  That has me thinking the hatch is on, I just missed it.

To Gray Reef, to Gray Reef, to catch a fat pig.

To Gray Reef, to Gray Reef, to catch a fat pig;
   Home again, home again, dancing a jig.
To Gray Reef, to Gray Reef, to catch a fat hog;
   Home again, home again, jiggety-jog

                                                   Apologies to Mother Goose
                                                             -- where ever she may be.

It's about a four hour drive from Cody WY where we'd spent the night to the Gray Reef dam on the North Platte River -- that's if you do get sidetracked onto a 150 mile goose chase over the Big Horns on the way.   Long story short, an extremely enthusiastic guide at the fly shop in Cody insisted that we really really needed to go to his favorite spot, the North Fork of the Tongue River in the Big Horns.  Gray Reef is ugly and would be crowded he claimed.  I was dubious though curious, I have never fished the Tongue but have certainly heard of it.  We were finally convinced that we really would regret not checking it out by the guides absolutely unbounded confidence and the pictures he showed us of some very very large cutthroat trout.  What he didn't make clear was that the Tongue "River" in the Bighorns is  a creek that is about two feet wide and meanders through a willow choked meadow.  The only way to fish it is to wade up the middle of the stream -- which would be fine if you were the only people there -- we weren't. Every parking area had two or three cars in it and there were fishermen everywhere. We tried to access the river halfway on its flow out of the mountains.  This  required some careful map and compass navigation, negotiating some rough four wheel drive two tracks and a fair amount of backtracking. Eventually it was clear that we were as close to the river as we were going get and still had a big hike with serious elevation loss (and gain).  We left without wetting a line having wasted most of the day.

We got to Gray Reef at about 6PM after a scenic tour of northern and central Wyoming.  There was no one else there.  The flows over the dam were 4600 cfs. High enough that the island was inaccessible (for me anyway) but once we were rigged up we fished the outlet and Gerry landed his first fish of the trip. Ah, sweet relief! ... sweet joy!  A red rock-worm with a midge trailer was just the ticket.

 

Gerry is clearly happy about that fish.

We fished until dusk and together we hooked and landed a satisfying number of fish, perhaps six or eight more between us. We celebrated with drinks and burgers at the Sunset Grill in Alcova. We ended up spending the evening drinking with a hunting guide from Riverton WY, a self described "full-blooded Northern Arapaho".  We ended up closing the place down and  spent the night in one of their motel rooms.

The next day we fished until around 4PM and caught many more nice fish.  The size 16 rock worm patterns seems to be the pattern of the day.  The fish just couldn't get enough of them.

And thus ended our road trip.