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3. A Couple Hours on a Small Brown trout stream

I saw clouds in the sky this afternoon, and I knew that meant that I had to get to a stream quick and try to find a Blue Winged Olive hatch. I drove down to the lower stretches of a medium sized spring creek for the day. This stream is stocked with rainbows in the winter and spring, but they get cleaned out quickly. Browns are stocked once a year and have special regulations in place-there is a decent population of them year-round.

So it was brown trout I was in search of today in this little stream. I was hoping to see the bugs when I got there, but they were very sparse. Not a rising trout was to be seen. Still, there were some baetis on the water, so I started off with a little #20 dry fly. Nothing. Then I tried a #14 Parachute Adams with a #20 Olive Hare's Ear as a dropper-a rig that often works very well in this creek. I gave that a good try in both the riffles and the pools, but no takers. I had yet to see a trout, rising or otherwise. I was starting to wonder.

Finally, with no better ideas, I tied on a #4 streamer that I've tying lately. It's an ugly as sin squirrel tail job, but I thought I'd give it a try. A few casts after I tied this on, I got a vicious strike. I thought I had a real dandy of a trout on, but it was a smallmouth bass. A pretty good one though, at 16". It wasn't the biggest surprise in the world, as this creek does flow into a warmwater river, but definitely not what I was expecting.

Heartened by that, I kept fishing the streamer. Finally I did hook up with a brown trout-not a big one, but a feisty 12 inch fish. It was a very pretty fish, all colored up for spawning. I decided to end on that note, and headed back to the truck. By this point it would be too late for the afternoon Olive hatch I was hoping to hit anyway.

In all, it was a nice afternoon. But it sure has been a tough fall for the Blue Winged Olives. I'm still hoping to hit it at least once-they are calling for rain next week, and I'll be on the water when it happens. The days they are predicting rain coincides with a trip to a river with a very good Olive hatch, so we'll see.