With clouds appearing on the Western horizon and light rain forecast for the late afternoon, I was getting revved up by the thought of clouds of blue-winged olives pouring off the water.

It only took a few seconds to convince Chris Raine to abandon his adult responsibilities, and in the early afternoon, downriver we went.

Olive biot-body soft hackle
My biot-bodied soft hackle emerger. That’s a #22.

Sadly, the clouds rolled in… about two hours too late. We fished a very flat, very clear stretch of water where the fish simply disappeared like UFOs if you got a little too close, which didn’t seem very close at all.

This is the time of the year when long leaders are needed along with a healthy dose of sneakiness and a little luck, and the flies – outside of the hummingbird-sized October Caddis – are tiny.

When a patch of clouds obscured the sun, the trout would rise sporadically, but as soon as the sun shone brightly, the fish would simply stop, unwilling to hang around in water so painfully clear that to an osprey, the trout would look like they were suspended in mid-air.

Upper Sacramento berries
Fishing was tough, but the eatin’ was OK.

Several different bugs were flying, including a small BWO, a very tiny greenish mayfly, the odd #16 PMD, and what looked like a few #18 rusty spinners. And that’s ignoring the midges, errant small caddis, even some small stoneflies.

I fished a pair of BWO patterns and had four grabs. One was a zero, one was pricked, and I turned two, but hooked none. Chris did about the same, and while not landing anything is humbling, I was frankly pretty happy with the four bites I got.

We weren’t fishing to rising fish as much as hunting the potential for them; a fish would rise once or twice and then disappear for ten minutes, so hunting them became a game of marking risers, wading ever so sloooooowly into position, and then hoping they’d come up again.

Upper Sacramento and Chris Raine
Raine sneaking up on ‘em. Slowly.

It’s easy to walk away from an afternoon like that and wonder why I didn’t simply go fish the less-demanding faster water somewhere else, but in truth, this is what Fall and Winter mean to some of us – the chance to have our asses handed to us by picky, spooky fish under difficult circumstances.

This doesn’t mean I won’t go fish the faster water next time (given the generally sunny forecasts, I probably will), and I don’t disdain the rare trip when I catch big fish and lots of them, but I’m in the process of writing a post about the idea of “fair chase” among sportsmen, and by definition the concept includes the odd beating – the day when the prey simply outsmarts the predator (even a largely symbolic predator).

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

[tags]fair chase, BWO, predator, Upper Sac[/tags]

Posted in Fishing Report, Fly Fishing, Upper Sacramento.