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What time of the day do caddis flies generally emerge? Do they emerge in the morning?
Bruce

Hi Bruce-

Not generally. If you are looking for a general rule, it would be from mid-afternoon to mid-evening, although there are exceptions.

And Pennsylvania Grannoms, I believe, are one of those exceptions.

I always seem to find caddis skimming over the water as the sun goes down into dusk. OK, maybe not always, but that seems to be prime fishing time to tie on an elkhair caddis for me. I don't ever remember seeing a big caddis hatch in the middle of the day - it's always as the sun is going down and the light is beginning to fade.

Just my 2 cents worth...

Jonathon

WRONG......
it's always as the sun is going down and the light is beginning to fade.
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RIGHT......

If you are looking for a general rule, it would be from mid-afternoon to mid-evening, although there are exceptions.
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* I would take Taxon's word for it!

Roger is a very smart guy...fellas...He said, "If you are looking for a general rule"...The word "general" is a qualifier. When you are standing in the stream at dusk and the air is full of caddis don't confuse this with a "hatch" or the "emergence". What you are witnessing is the by-product of days of hatching activity.

If you want to believe that caddis only hatch in the evening that's fine with me (I know Roger that's not what you said) stay in the beer Stube and I'll wave at you from the stream, on a sunny day, around noon, with my rod bent over, with a hog on the end of my line, with a caddis pattern firmly hooked in his jaw! I guess we forgot to tell him there are no caddis hatching during the day...

I do have two quick evening caddis stories...One was years back on the North Branch of the Au Sable...It was heading towards dark and I was pissing in the woods on an island in the river. I looked up to see trillions of dark caddis with little green egg sacks all flying in the same direction towards the setting sun and a beautiful glistening,in the waning sunlight, riffle just right for ovipositing those egg sacks. It was surreal! Like someone had just hit a switch and they could not stop what they were doing...Think of the flying monkey scene in the Wizard of Oz...Ich habe ein wunderbarer Nacht gehabt!

1995. $3.00 Bridge area on the Madison. The sun was going down when I looked above the schrubs behind where I was sitting on the banks to see ga-zillions of caddis chasing each other around at the tops of the bushes. I had to get up really early the next day to fish in Paradise Valley and was thinking about sleep. The cloud of caddis worked it's way over the river and little by little got lower and lower. Then, every so often one or two bugs would land for a short moment on the water and then rejoined the bacchanal...I was standing up to leave and I started to see porpoising head-and-shoulder rises that I will never forget...Ich habe ein wunderbarer Nacht gehabt!

Sorry to add my two cents here and then some, but in my humble opinion...

Spence

There was a newbie on the Madison that night and he was struggling a bit. I was still arguing with myself about leaving. I gave him a "secret fly" when I saw a rise that went something like this...Snout...one thousand one...one thousand two...one thousand three...dorsal fin...It was Mr. Big! I'm standing on the bank next to the rise and the young guy casts and there is a gapping open mouth, my heart is racing, and he pulls the fly out nicking Mr. Big...He said I made him nervous...I decided not to leave fish for fish, to hell with sleep, I came here to fish not sleep anyway, I strung up the rod and pounded anything that rose until they stopped! I was at Armstrongs bright and early at 6:00am! I will admit that driving back to Ennis after Armstrongs I was falling asleep behind the wheel...I had to stop and go in to some place, try to engage some clerk, and bought a hugh diet pepsi!

My eyes are not WRONG, that's when I've seen the largest concentrations of caddisflies. Others may see them at different times in different places than I fish, but what I am seeing is, lots and lots of caddisflies coming out over the water as the sun is going down and into DUSK, when they are skimming over the water only millimeters from the surface.

Seen it in Michigan and Texas...maybe your home waters are different, but that's what I have seen and I am not WRONG.

Jonathon

P.S. The single largest caddis hatch I have ever seen anywhere was ten feet wide, three feet deep, and about a quarter of a mile long, as the sun was setting, on a little brown trout stream in south-central Michigan. Fish were leaping out of the water to take them on the wing - one of the four nice ones I took that night actually did that right in front of me.

P.S. Huron River for smallies and bluegills as well - evening/sunset is when the caddis action is happening out there as well.

P.P.S. Spence's two stories above seem to confirm my observations.

JMD

Is it possible that this conversation is lodged on the rocky shoals of emerging/hatching vs. ovipositing caddis? I only ask because Louis is right about PA Grannoms. They're a morning emerger for the main part. Then they seem to drizzle back late in the afternoon to lay eggs

Emergence-wise, for all other caddis, I can't say for certain other than to note that I see a lot of them when I see a lot of them. Except for the egg layers, which I generally see later in the day from late afternoon increasing towards dusk.

But the main Grannoms on PA streams usually get going in force by 10AM on colder mornings and even earlier on milder mornings. They go for a while and then courteously take a midday break so you can go get a sandwich or a siesta. Then the egg layers come back.

Unless I've only been doing the time change in the Fall and ignoring the one in the Spring and hence have that part of it all screwed up, this is the timing for the main Grannom hatches/emergences...

Lee,

"Is it possible that this conversation is lodged on the rocky shoals of emerging/hatching vs. ovipositing caddis?"

You hit it right on the head Lee...Spence just needs an editor and rambles on like Tolstoy and you are the poet.

Technically, "hatching"/"emerging" of an aquatic insect can take place at any time 24/7...Us anglers, over the years, have keyed in on peak times. Maybe we are just convincing ourselves that we can sit in the warm restaurant another hour, maybe checkout the waitress, have another cup of coffee...We aren't "really" missing anything, right?!

A few years back I was floating with a friend and we had daytime Brown Drakes coming off! Another time I was up in late May and this monster mayfly came floating downstream in the middle of the morning. It stood out like you wouldn't believe. At first I didn't even believe it was a bug, I thought it was a twig or something. I took it back to the shop and we never really id'ed it...Maybe the early cousin of the Hex, maybe Litobrancha recurvata, or Siphoplecton basale...

Many years back I got hung up on the North Branch in the middle of the night. I was in an area I hadn't been in before and the water was creeping up my waders...I was catching fish though...The bug that was coming off I took for Stenonema heterotarsale (whatever it's called now I don't know, I'm sitting in my office) and found some in the shrubs the next day...The old man who helped me off the river that night was calling them Sulphurs...

I don't have a problem with observing that at dusk seems to be a good time to run in to some caddis and in great numbers, I'm just saying that they hatch all day and probably all night...If you are on the Au Sable in May and it's a pleasant sunny day say from 10:00 on, it's a good idea to have your caddis imitations handy...If you ever run in to a regular on the Au Sable ask him about the "Popcorn Caddis".

I guess that my answer to the original question should have been...Lastchance, figure out what hatches on the river you are going to fish and the time of year you are going to be there...Imitate the caddis expected and be observant and not afraid to tie one on when you see them coming off. How's that? And don't be surprised that when you get to the stream there are already trout sucking in caddis.

I know that folks think that the times have changed re the lowly caddis since LaFontaine's book, but I still think that this little critter and it's cousins are still way over-looked...And that's all I'll say about that!

Spence

Lastchance...An after-thought...I would like to do an experiment and go out on a limb. A well rounded angler who knows how to fish all of the water from the stream bottom to the surface, and not so hung up on dry's like Spence, could go to the stream just with his caddis patterns and would be able to catch fish all season, anytime of the day, and could leave everything else at home...

P.S. Go to www.gateslodge.com and click on "Fishing Report" and read Josh's report...I was going to paste some of it here and thought better of dragging him in to a debate he has nothing to do with...

Scroll down a bit and there is a nice photo of a few Henny's riding on an Au Sable river boat.

Spence

The Brown Trout there was caught by a Steve Williams that has some flies on that Hans Weilenmann Fly Tyers page...So does his wife Loren...I have crossed paths with Steve and his brother over the years hanging around the river. He also has a nice Henny emerger pattern listed in that book "Tying Emergers" by Schollmeyer/Leeson...A book worth owning IMHO.

Spence: Don't sell the notion of Tolstoy-like fulminations short. After all, they teach his work at the university level all over the world.

Never mind that it isn't unusual for college psychological service offices to be flooded with European Lit. majors grappling with the terrible futility of going on even one more day bound to this mortal coil in the wake of these Tolstoy course offerings.

That doesn't negate the fact that they teach his stuff..

In the meantime, I'm down here swatting flies with a CV that doesn't include anything more notable than writing for PA Angler, a state level TU newsletter, a dying Encyclopedia Britannica, the occasional AAA travel mag and, well, once I wrote a print ad for an all-natural toothpaste that lasted on the market for 17 weeks, give or take a month or so.

Stick with it. You could be the next Tolstoy. If you make it and they start teaching your stuff in college, I'll send you a case of organic toothpaste (possibly past the expiration date now) and a full leather bound edition of E. Britannica. In Indonesian. I think that (and maybe Hindi and/or Korean) are the only remaining print editions....:)

Cheers,

Lee

Lee,

You are getting me in trouble, man! I'm sitting at my desk in my office and I'm laughing out loud and my wife, whom I work with, and her staff are trying to figure out why! I'm busted, "Spence get to work! Your surfing the web again instead of getting anything done!? If it has anything to do with fly fishing or hockey I'm sending your ass home!"

Maybe we here at Trout Nut need to send you a Care package or something...Something better to read at least. How about an old tattered copy of, "Fly Fishing in America"?

Hey! We spent all those formative years listening to professors droning on..."How and the hell did I end up in a Samuel Beckett class? This guy's depressing!"

I was thinking Lee...Maybe you are actually in jail down there "One Mile South of Lake LeBoeuf" and you are blogging us from the wardens computer...Should we send lawyers, guns, or money?

I better get back to it...Her comes the boss!

Spence

Uh, oh, I'm one of those guys droning on, I'm afraid. Though it's more likely to be about Hamlet, not Waiting for Godot.

Louis,

I think that I remember that Sammy Beckett was rather fond of Willy Shakespeare...Maybe I didn't sleep through that class after all...Most of the time I was day dreaming and staring out the window at the Zenaida macroura or the Cardinalis cardinalis hiding in the schrubs near the window.

My prof was actually a woman of Greek decent. A poet. I was newly married and had a problem with run-on sentences (go figure!), she thought she could straighten me out up in her office...To her it was a problem with punctuation and a little lesson would serve me well...My first wife was rather young and taking classes at the same university as me and she wasn't too happy with the idea of her new husband getting any kind of lessons from this mysterious woman...I turned her down and now you poor souls on Trout Nut are paying for it...

Spence