It feels like SUMMER!

Good Morning - sorry for the lack of fishing reports, I have been on the road and unable to post reports due to remote locations and lack of power/internet. Just got back from Christmas Island ten days ago. It was a remarkably fun two weeks of catching. I hosted two fantastic groups of anglers and made a lot of new friends.

 Now I am sitting in the airport again waiting to board the first of three planes. I left Maupin at 4:30 AM and will be spending quite a bit of time in the air as I make my way halfway around the world to INDIA. I leave Friday morning and land on Sunday morning. Target species on this trip: Golden Mahseer.  These are the tigers of the Himalayan rivers and can get up to 60 lbs. I am armed with a bunch of gear and ready to do battle with a beast or two - if all goes well and I get lucky! I will be gone for the next few weeks, but John will be manning the shop along with our new employees - Gabor, Ruby, and Gwynn. We have a great crew heading into summer! 

Ruby and Gabor went to Christmas Island with me. Here are their pictures:

I have a little bad news to report - the river levels out of the Madras dam jacked up a bit over the last two days. The river is going to be a bit high, but should remain quite fishable. Perhaps you will have to stick a little closer to shore at your favorite spots, but the fish are getting more and more active and more and more happy as the weeks roll closer to the Salmonfly hatch. 

It was warm and beautiful last weekend and felt like spring had sprung. But, the spitting snow later in the week changed that Spring feeling.  The warm weather earlier in the week certainly got the bugs moving around and the water warmed up a bit. With the good bugs also come the bad ones - so be sure to do a tick check after a day of walking along the river. The good bugs are the ones that capture the attention of the trout and they have been coming on strong - large dark-winged caddis, blue winged olive mayflies, and the odd skwala stonefly can be found along the Deschutes as this time of year - so keep a dry fly rod handy for the hatch, The first really big hatch of the year is upon us now - the March Brown mayflies have been waiting until their favorite month (ironically, April) to make an appearance. A few have been spotted - and they will be coming on strong as the month goes on. Look for the big numbers of sailboat-like bugs below riffles and rapids. The wings of the March Browns look way too large for the little tan/brown bodies. There are two varieties on the D, one with a solid wing and one with a speckled or mottled wing in the dun stage. Both will become clear winged after they mate and molt. The speckled wing rithrogena morrisoni is the most common. 

The most productive fishing method will to nymph fish down deep using a large black or golden stonefly nymph trailed with a perdigon in blue or orange or a natural March Brown soft hackle-style fly with a tungsten bead. If your flies are not bumping along the bottom and getting stuck once in a while, and you are using an indicator, try lengthening the amount of leader below the indicator. Trout are looking for the nymphs as they drift migrate just prior to the salmonfly hatch, and they do that by tumbling down on the rocky river bottom. If you are using your indicator as a bobber, the fly will be suspended off the bottom of the river and will not look natural to the trout. Imagine if you saw a car floating down the street suspended five feet above the pavement - your reaction to that is the same as a trout's reaction to a suspended stonefly. Now, sometimes your nymphs will work great and will get strikes as they rise up from the bottom - the trailing nymph or the nymph on a tag will often get the most attention because of the rising action. At the end of a drift, as the line begins to tighten up, the nymphs will naturally start to come off the bottom. If you are fishing a soft hackle, or a caddis pupa and it begins to rise up from the bottom, this action will illicit a strike from a trout because caddis and mayflies actually do emerge from the bottom of the river during a hatch. Stoneflies, on the other hand, simply crawl to the water's edge and climb out onto the grass or logs to break out of their old bodies and morph into their adult flying bodies. 

I don’t have too many Deschutes photos to post, so bear with a few CXI pics and think about your next adventure!