Big Drakes (big mayflies)

Some of our best fly fishing happens in far-away places like Northwest Montana and Idaho. I travel there every year, although not as much as I would like. I don't know enough about fishing those places to say much. I'm a happy tourist there. What I do know well is Southwest Montana, where we don't see big drake hatches with the same regularity as BWOs and PMDs. We do get sporadic Green Drake hatches on the Madison and on the Gallatin from late June through to the middle of July. On cloudy days the hatches can be intense. On sunny days I've never seen more than a few scattered individuals. Thick, fish dimpling everywhere you look Green Drake hatches do occasionally happen but only rarely--usually on oddball days that alternate between sunny and then suddenly threatening to rain. Why would that be? Do the mayflies listen to weather reports? It may not make sense but that is how it seems to be.

Sammy Knowles and his lovely wife Jenny travelled from Deadman's Cay in the Bahamas to Bozeman one summer ten years or so ago. Sammy and Jenny stayed with Pam and Rodney King, the then owners of the new defunct Bozeman Angler. Sammy and Jenny's son recently completed a physics degree at Montana State so the Knowles have a strong family connection to Montana. And us to them too. Sammy is retired now but he sure was a fun bonefish guide to work with. Sammy won the Bahamas Bonefish Tournament once too. Maybe even twice. Sammy knows how to fish.

When they were here Rodney asked me to guide Sammy on Gallatin. Rodney would be taking him belly-boating on Meadow Lake the following day, but he wanted Sammy to see a bit of the Gallatin too. There are lots of guides in Bozeman but Rodney asked me because my wife Adele and I were good friends with Sammy and Jenny. It was early in July. I took Sammy to a stretch of the Gallatin at the mouth of the Canyon below Big Sky. That stretch is all posted now but wasn't then. It used to be one of my favorite spots. The minute we got there the sky above suddenly shifted from bright and sunny to cloudy and threatening to rain. Green drakes immediately started to appear as if out of no where. The fish went nuts. There were rising fish everywhere you looked.

For anyone who has experienced a good Green Drake hatch it's hard not to notice their dark green abdomens are proportionalely fat among mayflies as a whole. And those abdomens actively wriggle, like tiny green snakes as they ride along the surface. How would a fly tier imitate that behavior?

Sammy had two fly boxes Rodney had put together but there were no big Green Drake patterns. There were some big nymphs that might have worked but Sammy wanted to fish dry flies--something he never gets to do in the Bahamas. I put on the biggest Callibaetis pattern in Sammy's box, a fly Rodney had there for the next day's fishing at Meadow Lake. Sammy was as good with a fly rod as anyone I've ever seen. He was getting a hit on every other cast but he couldn't seem to hook a fish. Every time he got a hit he pointed the rod right at the fish, waited a half a second and then set the hook by pulling sharply with his left hand. But by then it was a half a second too late. The sun suddenly came out again and the Green Drakes stopped hatching, almost as if a switch had been flipped. Sammy looked at me and said:

"Now I know why you guys come down to the Bahamas and set the hook too soon!"

We sometimes hear about Gray Drakes and Brown Drakes too, here in the Gallatin Valley. I can't remember actually seeing them without travelling. I once drove all the way to Silvercreek in Idaho to fish the brown drake hatch. It was quite an experience. Silvercreek is always a bit crowded during the summer season. If you want the challenge of fishing over healthy, brighly-colored intellectual fish with advanced graduate degrees in confidence detection there is no better place to go than Silvercreek. Brown Drake time is even more crowded than usual.

Brown Drakes hatch late in the day so most people try their best to stake out a good-looking territory just before dark, but in the end it doesn't really matter where you fish. Right before sundown the spinners from yesterday's hatch appear, all flying upstream in oddly parallel lines as if they were all aligned to perhaps polarized light reflections slanting up from the meandering creek. The largest Pale Morning Dun patterns in your box work well during this spinner blizzard. Today's new duns don't start emerging until after dark. At that point pattern doesn't seem to matter. A Royal Wulff works as well as expensive extended body Brown Drake pattern. In the dark fish will be sloshing in shallow water all around you. To actually catch a fish it works best to cast across and then to skid any large dry fly across the surface, similar to a dry fly steelhead technique. The nighttime dun hatch is more about hearing than seeing. I'm glad I heard it once. It was quite a sight.

Gray drakes? I try to keep one or two patterns in my boxes, usually tied as a Pittendrigh Paragon. I don't often get to use them.

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