Spring creek fishing has been a recurring theme. I do love fishing on the creeks. This time around I'll try to concentrate more on flies and a bit less on strategy and habitats. But they are hard to separate. Fly choices usually relate to strategies and habitats. And to time of day and seasons.
During the early 1980s I had a Montana Outfitters licence and often did overflow "pickup" guiding for local shops late in the season when I wasn't busy building boats. I worked that way for most of the local shops, including the Yellowstone Angler. When 1990 rolled around I was 42 years old. I decided to re-shuffle the cards and started college as an older-than-traditional-age student, studying computer science. Almost the first thing I did was call George Anderson, to see if I would be able to work closer to full time during the summers, in between old-fart classes. George hesitated. "How good are you at the Spring Creeks?" George asked me. I lied and told him I'd been fishing the creeks forever. I got the job I wanted. I also knew I had some catchup to do. Fast.
My old friends Randy Berry and Chuck Tuschmidt, who both worked for George, helped me out. A lot. Randy Berry put about two dozen flies in my boxes and told me to start off fishing Pheasant Tails, Brassies and wet flies in the riffles early in the day when nothing was rising yet. Then, when the water started to dimple at 11:00am or so to find slick water below a riffle, and to tie on some mayflies. Wet or dry. And also to change flies a lot. "Don't let any fish refuse the same fly more than twice," Randy said. That was pretty much it. The main thing was to use small sparsely-dressed flies of vaguely the right size and color. Tiny and gray for Blue-winged Olives. A tad bigger and more yellow (although I gradually began to prefer olive over the more traditional yellow) for Pale Morning Duns. Wet or dry or spent wing didn't matter. Start with something you like (or your customer likes) and run with it. Until it comes time to change.
I managed to get through the first few weeks of Spring Creek fishing--as a guide--without getting fired. By the end of the second or third season I was an old hand. This chapter ends with what amounts to a gallery, that was inspired by the flies my good friend Randy gave me when he was teaching me how to be a spring creek guide. Words are useful but they are abstract and hard to put your hands around. A box of flies in your hands burns confidence into your gray matter. It did for me.
Late in the season when it was tough for everybody else, I often did well. I remember one day at the first culvert upstream from the swan ponds at DePuy's when my clients caught nine fish, late in the season when everybody else was getting skunked. We were using 2" inch long yellow foam hoppers and small white streamers. Bob Auger came around with his log book at one point, and said "Sandy you've out-fished everybody today. It was tough today. You out-fished Al Gadoury!" It's worth pointing out that's a rare event. Al of 6x Outfitters was and still is one of the great creek masters. That was also an example of me fishing the creeks in oddball ways nobody else did. During the hatches I followed suite and fished the same as everybody else. Casting small dry flies to dimpling fish is what the customers want. Me too. That's the most fun fishing there is. But when the fish are not dimpling you sometimes have to apply an attitude adjustment.
The creeks are lined with weeds all summer long, which are covered with scuds. I have watched fish foraging for scuds on both the creeks and on some of the big tail waters. I've seen the same behavior in both places. Scud foraging fish dive into the weeds and shake their heads vigorously, presumably to dislodge scuds. They seldom keep that activity up for long. After a minute or two of head shaking they usually head back to a well-defined holding spot. Real, still alive scuds camouflage themselves by adopting the same green color as the weeds they live in. That's an example of the Background Mimicking behavior described by Hugh Cott in Adaptive Coloration in Animals. When scuds die, for what ever reason, they quickly become surprisingly bright bright orange. I have always, no matter what, had better luck fishing orange scuds than green ones.
Scuds are an underrated spring creek fly. For reasons that don't necessarily make sense scud flies are common on the big tail water rivers, but used less on the spring creeks. On the creeks, in the early season, from late Winter through to the end of the rainbow spawn in early April local fishermen often use hot fluorescent pink or orange egg flies. As the season progresses I see progressively fewer egg flies every day, until they are all but extinct until perhaps late fall. I don't know anything about steelhead fishing, where egg flies originated. How big is a King Salmon egg? I don't know, but I do know trout eggs are tiny. Scuds are a lot bigger. I find myself wondering if Rocky Mountain trout that eat hot pink egg flies during the winter season are responding to impulses more closely related to scud behavior than to trout egg behavior. Orange scuds are effective flies on the spring creeks all year long. I also feel more confident fishing orange scud patterns than green ones. Pink, orange and green scuds can all be said to match the hatch, but only green scud patterns can be said to match the camouflage.
Even in prime Pale Morning Dun season the mayflies only hatch for maybe three hours a day, usually from 11:45 to 2:30 or so. They'll sometimes hatch longer but it does have to be cloudy to make that happen. There are always at least a few midges around and sometimes a good midge hatch will unexpectedly happen. Late March can be really fun midge fishing. It's possible to catch midgeing fish on dry flies. If you do want to ply visible dry flies during a midge event most the most trendy midge dry flies look like a black Serendipidy Nymph tied with a bit more white wing tuft on top, which helps keep the fly both afloat and easier to see at a distance.
..........dry fly midge image here
I find Brassies more reliable than their dry fly counterparts. I often like to fish white-tufted dry fly midge like the one above, with a Brassie trailing along behind. In fact that's my goto midge hatch setup. In a wider, not necessarily midge event context the three most all-around anytime of year and anytime of day flies to use are Brassies, Pheasant-tail Nymphs and Soft Hackle Wet flies. The soft hackles can be more or less any color. I like black the best but brown yellow and olive all work too. There are a zillion other fly choices but they do tend to be special purpose choices, like Sparkle Duns or No-hackles at noon on the Fourth of July, when there is a PMD hatch in full swing.
One memory that sill makes me smile happened at the picnic tables at Nelson's Spring Creek. I had three young Japanese computer programmers from Yokohama for three days. They wanted one day on the Spring Creek, one day floating the big river and one day hiking into grasshopper meadows in the Park. Those guys were all fly tiers. I never saw so many flies. How did they have room for clothes on the flight over the Pacific? Each one of them had a stack of large clear plastic fly containers four or five boxes high. For each pattern, for each of 2 or 3 sizes they had a dozen flies packed into each square compartment. They had Compara Duns, Sparkle Duns and No-hackle duns, plus nymphs and emergers too. But all they wanted to actually fish were classic Catskill Dry flies. I tried to get them to fish nymphs in the early morning. "We'll fish dry flies when the bugs start to hatch," I told them. They acted like they understood everything I said but they mostly replied in Japanese. They spoke more English than I did Japanese but communication was still difficult. They never did change flies. They fished Hendricksons and Quill Gordons all day long. From beginning to end. It was a bit weird. They never did get more than 20 feet apart. And boy did they catch fish, at least once the hatch started anyway.
There was a steady spring creek customer the guides all knew and liked in those days. He as a wide-bodied jovial guy who tipped well. He was a Hollywood producer of some kind. I think he made TV shows rather than movies. He loved to fish and he always had the most expensive gear. I can't remember his name but at one point he walked up to me, near the weed beds adjacent to the picnic area. While smiling and waving his hand toward my closely grouped Japanese clients, who were knocking'm dead with Classic Catskill dry flies, he said: "Sandy! You're making me feel like General Motors!"
Flies so sparsely tied they are hard to keep afloat, according to the moral of that story, is more important than overall profile. Those guys helped make me a believer. Messy-looking classic Catskill flies are easy to tie. Beautiful, neat and tidy Art Flick or Dette-style Catskill flies are not so easy. That's my only remaining complaint. Classic Catskill dry flies are hard to tie but beautiful to look at. And they work. I like Compara Duns too but I'm no longer convinced they work any better. Classic Catskill flies are part of my "change flies a lot" repertoire now. No more no less than any other.
Meriwether Lewis, July 29 1805, on the Jefferson River a few miles above the Three Forks of the Missouri
We see a great abundance of fish in the stream some of which we take to be trout but they will not bite at any bate we can offer them
The following is a collection of flies I might have pulled out of the bins for a high roller. We did get a few of those. I even had--well--I doubt he's still alive because I was a lot younger then and even I'm an apprentice geezer now. So I won't say his name. It was fun to have customers for whom money did not in any way matter. The following might have been a collection I would have put together for him. If you're a tier you could make this collection. Buying all the materials might cost more than the flies. But still. Tying is life.
...and image gallery, with captions, appears here....
So far I've proposed dry fly size is important, during an active hatch, while the roles of color and silhouette might matter too but if so less less so. What matters most of all is the fishermen. Call it Chi, Moxey or Aura, what ever it is some fishermen have it in spades and others do not. My lifelong fishing buddy Patrick Jobes has consistently out-fished me for the past 40 years while using some of the fuzziest, ugliest flies known to Western Civilization. It's worth mentioning too that Moxey is not the same as presentation. Casting skills can be learned and refined. The predatory eyes ears instincts and reflexes of the hunter are bequeathed at birth. We have to live with who we are and to make the best of it. You could fish for a hundred years and never catch up to George Anderson. The Universe does have certain fundamental rules that cannot be altered or changed. Moxey is one of them.
None of that discounts the obvious importance of what so many writers refer to as 'presentation.' Practice and skills matter almost as much as Moxey. Years of coaching, long hours of film sessions and on-court experience gradually and inevitably improves basketball players like Jamal Mashburn or Ben Simmons. But it never turns them into Michael Jordon. At playoff time Michael, Magic, Koby, Larry and Akeem matter most of all.
Elaborate, sometimes complex fly tying is fun. Fly tying has been and continues to be a lifelong hobby for me. But I know with great certainty my old friend Patrick will out-fish me the next time we meet on a stream. And Patrick never has much more than a few old time standards in his box, like Gray Hackle Yellow, Parachute Adams, George's Brown Stone, bead head Zug Bug, Latex Caddis and maybe a Yellow Sally or two. And none of them well tied.
With almost equal certainty I feel confident my creative fly collection helps me to keep that disparity in check. If Patrick had access to my fly boxes I would be left even further behind. Cool flies help. A little anyway. The fisherman makes the biggest difference of all.