From: rw


I'm going to offer a question for ROFF: What are the coolest hatches
you've ever seen? Here's my list:

- Brown Drakes on Silver Creek, Idaho. These huge mayflies (#8) make a
phenomenal spinner fall in the evening, and continue through the night.
You can catch fish in the pitch black of night, striking by ear.

- Morning Tricos on Silver Creek. Another spinner fall. It requires a
dead calm, or the tiny bugs are blown off the water. The fish feed on
pods, hoovering in rafts of bugs. You fish downstream, aiming your fly
into a mouth.


- Salmonflies on Marsh Creek and the Middle Fork of the Salmon. Huge
gyrocopter-like bugs that always look on the verge of crashing.

- Black caddis on the Bighorn. Keep your mouth closed.

- Green drakes on the Big Wood.

Siphlonurus Alternatus on the Swift in MA. The spinner fall rather than the
hatch. The big size 10 spinners drop right at dark, and sometimes in such
numbers that attempting to fish it is useless. Sadly, this hatch seems to be
disappearing on this river for no apparent reason.

Trico spinner fall on the Battenkill. Same as you described on Silver Creek.
The Eastern Tricos are *small*, 26 and 28 toward the end of the hatch. I used
to tie a "double" fly on an 18 or 20 so I could use a decent sized hook. Worked
to an extent, but was far from perfect.

Hendrickson/Red Quill hatch on the Farmington River in CT. Here again sometimes
so heavy at it's peak it is nearly impossible to fish.


George Adams

"All good fishermen stay young until they die, for fishing is the only dream of
youth that doth not grow stale with age."
---- J.W Muller