Two weekends ago, a pair of us humans fished the Upper Sac under what we both described as “pleasant” conditions.

Thanks to the selfless sacrifice of my #20 winged compadres (and an upstream reach cast), we hooked many rainbow trout.

Ahh, my BWO friends made all this possible...

Truly, we appreciate your help, though we’d like to point out we made sacrifices of our own (we accidentally left the thermos of hot chocolate at home, a travesty that still brings me to tears).

Days later, in the same sunless, cloudy-but-pleasant conditions, Chris Raine and I found more BWOs, and more rising trout.

They were very big trout.

At least three were 16″ long, and at least four others were bigger than 12″ (and those were just the ones I know about from firsthand, personal experience).

Yes, my friends, it was a very good day. And again, that was due largely to you, the BWOs (and that reach cast).

So it was with some excitement that Raine and I noticed last Tuesday’s forecast was for “Perfect” blue-winged olive weather.

Wet. Drizzly. Miserable even.

Manly stuff. To fish it, we would have to show courage.

We could not contain our child-like glee. (Admittedly, Raine doesn’t do “glee” all that well. In fact, the little dance is downright embarassing.)

We piled on the warm clothes. The rain jacket. The gloves. The gooberish hats.

And went to the river.

And stood.

In the rain.

In other words, my dun-colored friends, we showed.

But you didn’t.

Nor did the trout.

What gives?

(And why am I writing like a college Hemmingway wannabe?)

The Hemmingway-Free Zone

I’m always a little startled by the number of people who say their favorite hatch is the Blue-Winged Olive.

It’s a great bug and all, but you almost never have to compete for a spot on the river when the BWOs are hatching.

Which, come to think of it, is probably why it’s a favorite.

Right now, the Upper Sacramento remains in astonishingly good shape for February, but then, we’ve experienced an astonishingly absent winter.

The snowpack is around 30% of normal, which is not an edifying number for us small stream types.

The fishing is good, but apparently not during perfect blue-winged olive weather. (It’s going to suck next summer, when the lack of snowpack is going to hurt a lot of my favorite small streams.)

Turns out almost nothing is ever simple in nature.

The Details

Because I’m still on the clock (much Hemmingway-ish copy must be written), here are a few details:

• You can have all them fancy flies, I still live and die by my Quigley Cripples (the Engle-modified micro version) and the amusingly-easy-to-tie Roy Palm emerger (shuck, biot body, dubbed thorax ball and two wraps of blue dun hen hackle).

• On the last trip I wore my one-size-too-big Orvis wading boots, and damned if my feet never got cold, and those studs of doom gripped nicely. These puppies work as well as they did last year.

• Location is everything. The first trip, the two of us hooked eleven trout yet landed only one, courtesy an accelerating tailout current that gave a hooked trout immediate leverage against a #20 hook. Not one broken tippet or bent hook, but only one landed trout. Not breathtaking.

• As we stood in the drizzle and watched no bugs float by and no trout rise, I told Raine this would never happen to a better outdoor writer, and he allowed as to how my tendency towards complex sentences might have doomed us.

It’s hell when your own friends turn on you (hey, I’m not the one who forget the hot chocolate), but it wasn’t just us.

I spoke to local uber-guide Craig Nielsen, who has the Klamath wired and has been basically crushing them, but even he found the crushing a little slower on the same wet, “perfect” day.

Apparently, I find it comforting when others suffer with me.

The explanations are endless. Falling barometer. Rising river. BWO Christmas. Karmically disadvantaged fly fishermen.

Whatever.

Fly fishing is like that; we reach for understanding, yet the moment we think we achieved it we’re reminded we basically don’t know shit, and probably never did.

See you on the river (in the rain), Tom Chandler.

Funny what a size 22 insect can do for a fly fisherman.

Thanks. I needed that.

The Upper Sacramento’s hatches are maddening; one day they’re gratifying. The next — despite perfect conditions — they’re nonexistent.

And yesterday’s conditions were were damned near perfect.

So I was prepared to get wet for no good reason at all.

Happily, at 1:15, enough BWOs showed to pull a few trout to the surface, a handful of which I tricked into eating my Quigley Cripple.

It’s a simple enough sentence, but fly fishermen read it and their pulse quickens.

Especially when the trout are, well… stunning:

In just the right light, they're stunning (better looking than your angry fingers)

Fall in the Upper Sacramento River canyon is easy on the eyes; half the trees are evergreens, yet the other half are turning red and yellow and orange, and those isolated riots of color stand out more than if they consumed the entire hillside.

The water is low and so clear it’s as if the river bottom is encased in Lucite.

It’s also a time when your hands sting every time you (foolishly) dip them in the water, and when the average size fish throw the hook before you can land them, you’re secretly relieved. Later, when you look at the photos involving fingers, they’ll be an almost angry red.

Our digits apparently are less enamored of fall than we are.

The Details

By the numbers? I had seven grabs, three of which turned into those “life the rod and feel them for a millisecond before the hook pops out” endeavors.

That leaves us with four hookups and three landed fish, all of which were in the 11″-12″ range.

All that happened on a #22 Quigley Cripple (the scaled-down Ed Engle version), the trout having already ignored the #20 Adams Parachute I’d started with.

I was fishing the Raine 8’3″ 5wt hollowbuilt I mentioned here, and as you’d guess, I kept pretty close tabs on its performance — right up until the first good drift over a trout was ignored and I switched to vengeful angler mode.

The verdict? It’s looking good, Undergrounders.

But more testing is needed. Lots more.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

One day you arrive late in the hatch and the trout show themselves just long enough to let you know they’re down there, but they stop eating even as the blue-winged olives continue to float by.

Wayne Eng contemplates vengeful trout on the Upper Sacramento

“Too late” you think, and the next day you head back (only much earlier), and you and your friends catch the exact same number of fish as the prior day, and this despite experiencing the entire BWO hatch instead of just 20 minutes of it.

As you stand there in water that is only barely liquid (water temps at the Upper Sac’s Delta gauge registered 36 degrees that morning), it’s not hard to think you threw the trout off balance for a few minutes by showing up early, but they recovered quickly and sulked on the bottom.

The result?

Day One Party Wide Trout Count: 3
Day Two Party Wide Trout Count: 3

In what has come to be a regular occurrence, the BWOs of “deep” winter are actually larger than those that hatch in the fall. The early bugs are #20s and #22s, but the bugs now look like perfect 18s, though some have much larger wings (I’m told the females have bigger wings).

Raine picked this cripple out of the film. Poor cripple...

With air temps hovering around the water temperature, fly fishing the Upper Sacramento would normally offer fly fishermen few chances at trout but excellent odds on frost bite, but through the miracle of modern gear, I was a toasy, happy camper the whole day.

Yes, it rained. Yes the BWOs are now a size 18. Yes, I was warm.

Last year I became a convert to the fly fishing soft shell, a remarkably lightweight jacket that’s achieved widespread acceptance among mountaineering and active types for its ability to keep the wearer dry even during high-output activities.

It’s an ideal choice for many situations, but this, my cold-weather Undergrounders, wasn’t one of them.

In truth, something warmer was called for – a Patagonia Micro-Puff jacket I got last year, but rarely wore on account of it being a little too warm.

The last week – with us experiencing temperatures in the low single digits and my time on the river making a weekend in a deep freeze seem tropical by comparison – I hauled it out, and was happy I did.

Lightweight, water resistant and damned warm, I’d marry it if I wasn’t already married (and let’s face it, the relationship would fall apart in the summer), but in terms of keeping me warm on the river, it was perfect – even to the point of being compressible and light enough to stuff in a vest back pocket.

It's winter - time to break out the prototype Raine quad hollowbuilt

As for fly rods, it’s oddly true that fishing tiny bugs on tiny tippet on the Upper Sacramento in the winter demands more rod than you might imagine.

A three weight sounds like the right piece of equipment, but the trout on this particular stretch are wary, and you regularly find yourself laying out long leaders and long casts, and my mainstay in the winter has been a strong 8.5′ 5wt, in this case a prototype Raine hollowbuilt quad that he loaned me for testing and forget to take back.

Let's hope Raine's not reading this...

Whenever I fish it and he’s around, I cringe, wondering if he’s going to remember and ask for it back. It’s not as if I don’t have other rods capable of doing the same job, but again, this one works real well, and only a fool would give that up.

At some point, you tend to settle in with the gear that works for you – and I’ve been that way roughly since I moved up here more than a decade ago – but every once in a while, you check out the new stuff and see if the state of the art has advanced (instead of the state of the industry’s marketing), and in the jacket world, it appears it has.

That’s coming from a guy who still mostly fishes bamboo and fiberglass fly rods, which suggests I’m a lot more interested in staying warm than I am in generating high line speeds. (Of the two, I know which is most useful on my river.)

Still, in the end, fly fishing the Upper Sacramento in the winter isn’t about gear or even catching a lot of trout.

It’s about practicing a sport in conditions where hope is your biggest ally, and the trout and the bugs often act like they’re out to drive you mad.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

I could pretend I went for the painted effect, but the pic just wasn't that sharp...

One of two for Chris Raine.

That applies in spades to this year’s winter fly fishing on the Upper Sacramento, where a long, long string of warm, sunny, non-BWO friendly days finally fell apart in yesterday’s rain, and Chris Raine and I headed for a stretch of dry fly water, hoping to score a good BWO hatch – the remnants of which might just still be holding on (it’s February after all).

The weather was good: the rain fell a little heavy at times, but it was wet enough to keep the olives on the water, and gray enough to make the trout feel safe enough to populate shallow feeding lies.

Sadly – in a clear example of personal responsibility fleeing the land – neither the BWOs nor the trout fully cooperated; in the long half mile stretch of water we could see, we found rising fish in… about 30′ of it. The hatch was light, and half-dozen fish we saw were only working intermittently.

If you think that’s a complaint, it’s not; we each had a shot at 2-3 working trout, and while Raine landed two and I netted one, the truth is only a massive whiner could expect more from the deeper recesses of winter.

Raine's first fish was gorgeous; light colored, big dark spots... (click image for bigger version)

Raine’s first trout was a very stocky 16″-17″; his second a more sedate 15″ trout. Mine came in shorter than both, though on the drive home, I maintained mine earned extra inches because he required a tougher drift. Raine, inexplicably, disagreed (clearly, I need some new friends).

The Gear Geekiness

Some bamboo fly rod users refuse to fish their cane rods in the rain (a practice which denies their existence as fly rods instead of museum pieces), but I love the practice. The varnish never seems so smooth, and the grain never quite so real as when it’s magnified by drops of water.

I love the look of bamboo fly rods in the rain; they smell like... varnish.

In honor of the fact I got a free sandwich out of the deal, I fished my Raine 8’3″ 4wt Hollowbuilt bamboo fly rod, which is about as perfect a rod as you can get for this sort of thing. Raine – who’s been building a lot more than he’s been fishing the last couple months – dragged along his prototype 8’3″ 5wt staggered ferrule hollowbuilt, a rod I covet, and not just because it’s amazing fishing tool.

It’s what I call a “builder’s rod” – a prototype where the cane for the butt section is flamed and striped, while the tip section is a mismatched, medium-toned cane.

At times I get tired of the relentlessly cosmetic obsessives that often populate the bamboo fly rod universe, and a “builder’s rod” makes a statement – this is a fly fishing rod, not some over-delicate, self-centered freak show attraction.

With feet as big as Raine's, you gotta figure wading's easy.

I did fully intend to test the Patagonia soft shell under rainer conditions than past trips, but it rained steadily and hard for a while, so I opted to hide the soft shell under a very lightweight backpacking rain shell, and I think I still came out ahead in the bulk department over my stops-bullets full on wading jacket.

With a series of low-intensity storms on the way, there’s a chance for more weekend adventures.The river was just picking up a little color, but flows were good, and yes, the wily fly fisher strikes while the rain falls. It’s like Christmas, you know.

I’ll see you on the river, Tom Chandler.

What I’m going to say next won’t surprise any of my fishing buddies: only minutes after jamming my gear in the truck and leaving my house, the skies cleared and the sun appeared – an occurrence common enough that the local Undergrounders have developed an acronym for it: it’s a “NOWE” (Non-Olive Weather Event).

My less-generous friends would say I “Tom’d” the hatch (and no, it isn’t a compliment).

Later – near Dunsmuir – the sunny weather made for nice light.

Fair enough. After all, we’re fly fishermen, which means we start whining when the rain stops and the warm, happy sun emerges.

In short, we aren’t exactly the poster children for mental health (at least not in the outdoor sense). Glancing apprehensively at a clearing sky might seem normal to us, but it’s the kind of behavior that’s likely a source of concern for our families.

Still, when you need the river time, you don’t let something like a little sunny weather stand between you and a trout, so Steve Bertrand and I found ourselves way downriver (somehow reasoning the BWO hatches down there are more reliable in sunny weather, though how we arrived at that I can’t honestly say).

We hiked past a lot of attractive-but-riseform-free water, eventually finding ourselves on a very flat, very shallow, very technical stretch of water I hadn’t fished in a year (and for good reason).

We interrupt this fishing report for an artsy-fartsy picture.

It’s the kind of place where simply easing yourself into casting distance means the fish can and will stop rising. Of course, we knew that, so we tried the old ploy of picking a spot and standing still for 20 minutes.

One minute, the trout seemingly believe you’re an oddly shaped predator, and the next, you’ve become new piece of cover, and voila – they’re rising cautiously again.

Well, on a cloudy, rainy day they’d start rising cautiously again.

On a sunny day – with only a few #20 BWOs floating by – the best they do is rise sporadically, and with long dead periods in between. Catching a single trout tends to put the rest of them down, and given the thinness of the hatch, that could mean they were down for good.

A Roy Palm Emerger worked where the parachute didn’t – especially once coated with a little Frog’s Fanny.

I caught the only trout I had a real shot at, and in an odd moment of synchronicity, Bertrand bagged his just upriver, and at times our drags were whirring in unison.

My trout was a 14″ specimen with a messed-up lip but an expansive mid-section, and Bertrand’s went a couple inches longer (though I still contend mine was “smarter,” and therefore counts for more).

Odd lip, but he’s got the Upper Sacramento color.

Steve had a shot at another fish and got him to eat, but didn’t get the hook in him. The hatch – never good to begin with – faded rapidly into memory, along with the rising fish.

In the fly fishing sense, that’s the end of the story.

And I was fine with that. Better than fine, actually.

A nice trout is a nice trout, and time spent on the river isn’t time spent at a computer monitor.

At some point in the recent past, I’d started waking up to the idea that the world’s being overrun by yahoos and buttheads, most of whom seem happy to follow the loudest, most-vicious voices in the crowd instead of thinking for themselves.

That trout rise for a while and then stop – simply because it suits them – feels refreshingly, well… real. It’s possible fly fishing remains interesting to me after 30+ years because I play the game in somebody else’s ballpark, and do so by their rules, which are never entirely clear at the time.

It’s intriguing stuff, and you can’t embrace it when it works for you and then whine endlessly about it when it doesn’t.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

fly fishing, fishing, upper sac, upper sacramento river, bwo, blue winged olives, rainbow trout

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Today’s weather might be a little clear, but that’s OK; I’ve got work to catch up on and little post-Stream Access Battle relaxing to do.

Still, when Thursday rolls around, I’m grabbing a rod, running for the river like I stole something, and putting a little tug into the lives of a few trout. Could be cosmic BWO weather all weekend, and I’ve sure as hell paid my dues for now.

Local guide Steve Bertrand — who along with Chris Raine represented for the long rod crowd at the Board of Supervisors meeting — has also recently suffered the slings and arrows of outrageously picky trout, and we’ve talking over strategies for catching these picky, picky low-water fish.

We’ll field test a few, and let you know.

 
The Roy Palm Emerger — normally a killer — hasn’t been too effective

The general season closes tomorrow, but with more and more of the state’s rivers being opened to year-round C&R fishing, why not get out and stand in the rain?

Cheaper than therapy.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.