fishing, casting, and recruiting

There is nothing like being on the water looking up and seeing millions of bugs
Green Drakes June of 95 or 96 standing on the trestle bridge on Penns Creek
what an awe inspiring site you do not want to stand there slack-jaw or your
mouth will be full.......April 03 grannom caddis hatch Penns Creek so many bugs
they blocked out the sun.......May 03 sulpur spinner fall Big Fishing Creek got
arm weary pulling in fish and i was not the only one.....May 04 another sulpur
hatch Penns Creek several days to be exact.....I have proberly seen many more
hatch in the 5 decades + years i have been fortunate enough to be on this
planet we call earth but never thought much of them untill i got the flyfishing
bug..... I have always been respectful of nature but stop and think what it
takes to make a fishery like Penns The Gunpowder The Madison Yellowstone or you
local trickle......... Mother Nature at her finest.........


Handyman Mike
Standing in a river waving a stick

"Mike" wrote

I have always been respectful of nature but stop and think what it
takes to make a fishery like Penns The Gunpowder The Madison Yellowstone
or you
local trickle......... Mother Nature at her finest.........

i can dig it, mike. i have often just sat on a rock in a pretty run on
hazel creek, and just let the water run through my legs, thanking god for
the chance that i found the place.

yfitons
wayno

here here done the same thing many times


Handyman Mike
Standing in a river waving a stick

riverman wrote:





I remember my first green drake, at least I think thats what it was. I
posted on roff about it. My overwhelming thought was of recognition from all
the pictures I had seen. It was an amazing feeling.


if i hadn't the good fortune to be fishing with mike makela at the time,
i never would have known the bug was a green drake. it was tan in color
and not as huge as i was expecting, and because of the near dark, its
green tint in the wings couldn't be seen. makela nabbed it from a nearby
tree leaf. we then fished using a huge green drake fly...both of us
hooked up. my fish, a brown, was about 14 to 15", the last fish hooked
on that day, and it went wildly airborne. on the second leap, it threw
the hook. pretty neat stuff...

jeff

Indian Joe has told the story many times of his vision of a trico hatch on
Silver Creek. I was in the campground the first evening and everyone said
the hatch would be about 9:30 the next morning. One guy who came to fish the
hatch each year showed me his fly box--size 20 male trico's- female trico's-
wounded trico's-size 22 trico's with the same assortment. . He shared a
couple of flies and helped me pick out a good spot on the creek the next
morning. There were around ten guys standing spread out around the creek
watching a few large pods of trout swimming all around us as I cast again
and again close to them with no results--the other guys just waited.

At 9:32 it happened--TRICO'S everwhere- in your eyes- in the air -in the
water
how could you get a fish to take your fly while the water was covered with
live flies? I could not !
After casting unsuccefully for twenty minutes I decided to try a different
fly and caught a couple of 12 inch trout on a royal wuff..
as the hatch faded twenty minutes later I had to leave but shared a couple
of royal wuffs with my new friend who was still flailing the water
unsuccesfully with a size 24 spent wing tryco spinner or some sort of
thing.

Now if you want to talk about major hatches on land I could tell you about
the Love Bug hatch in Florida in 1943-- drivers wrecked their cars because
the couldnot see highway--women ran around nude as they ripped off their
cloths to get the bugs out of their underware

"riverman" wrote in message ...
[snip excellent stuff]

In Wales, all the nymphs I saw swhere I was standing were between 1 and 2
feet below the surface: I looked deeper and never saw one go by at knee
level, and (in an effort to keep my sleeves dry) I tried to find one near
the surface to scoop up, but never saw one shallower than 1 foot deep. Also,
there were no fish rising near me, but they were rising about 10 meters
downstream from me, or in the calm pool above me. I suspect the fish near me
were eating nymphs that were 1-2 feet deep, that the fish 5 meters
downstream from me were eating nymphs that were 6 inches to 1 foot deep, and
the fish 10 meters downstream were eating nymphs on the surface.

--riverman

and hence a common practice is to fish an emerger on the surface with
a nymph on a dropper that will vary based on success. If you can
identify where in the column
the nymphs are floating so much the better.

on the Delaware up in the tailwater sections, this is a killer
technique and often the only one that will work.

"a-happy-up-yours"
wrote in message
hlink.net...
Frank Reid wrote:

1. Green Drakes at peak of hatch on Penn's
2.Sulfurs on Big Fishing Creek,
3.First Penn's clave, March Brown spinner fall.
4.Penn's again, April 2003, Grannom Caddis.
5. Hendricksons on Little Schuyllkill River.


I'll see your 5 and raise you the white miller hatch on either the
Potomac
or the Rappahannock River. I have caught it in both places. 30
feet out
from shore, you loose track of where you are. You can no longer
see the
shore. You need a scarf or settle on coughing up bugs for the
next week,
'cause they're so thick you can't breath.
I think the one on the Rappahnnock was the most intense as you
added
darkness into the picture. In both cases, if you had anything
white on the
end of your line, it wasn't on the water for more than 30 seconds.
Smallies, bluegill, carp, chub, anything in the water were all on
the
surface feeding.




First, I'm not easily surprised/amazed/puzzled.....

....First Penns Clave (2000), first day - Saturday, about 5 PM. I
stepped off the
island behind the Cherry Run cabin and I thought, for a few seconds,
that I was
having a TIE. There was a step function from daylight to near-total
darkness. March
Brown hatch all around me. Absolutely astounding. Never before or
after have I seen
any such concentration of insects. Had to be a hundred thousand big
flys involved,
at least. By the time I realized what had occurred, spit out all of
the bugs and
fumbled through my fly boxes, searching for the March Brown
imitations that were
still in the cabin, the event was concluded.

In the Carolinas, "hatches" are seldom seen, if they occur. This
was a halcyon
moment, for me and an event I'll never forget.

Tom

Jefferson river. As I look upstream, I can see a single remaining
cloud of early morning fog hanging over a stretch of river about three
hundred yards away. The sun is low and I can see uncountable bright
splashes as fish are rising everywhere in an astounding feeding
frenzy. It takes me a few minutes to realize that the cloud is not
fog, but millions of tiny bugs.

Culver's parking lot. 10 p.m. on a sultry June night. The hex are so
thick around the sodium vapor lamps that they've reduce available
light in the lot by 50% or more. It is impossible to take a step
anywhere in the lot without crushing twenty or more bugs.

Weyauwega. 9 p.m. on a sultry June night. Westbound on U.S 10 at
sixty miles per hour. Hit the hex hatch.....and I mean
HIT......halfway down a hill approaching Partridge Crop lake.
Impossible to tell for sure, but there must have been at least a
hundred of them hit the windshield in a small fraction of a second.
Sounded like it had been hit by several soaking wet towels. Instantly
blinded. Managed to coast to a stop on the shoulder without incident
and spent 15 minutes or so cleaning off the goo.

Wolfgang

On 6/27/04 12:40 PM, in article
, "rw"
wrote:

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

Just for sheer humor, Saturday night at the 2004 Penns Clave. A handful of
us were gathered at Three Streamer Stan's bridge in the evening. None of us
were gonzo/brave/stupid enough to string up a rod because of sporadic but
consistent lightning and thunder. So we spent an hour or two waiting for
the rain to stop and trying to capture representatives of the three or four
hatches that were simultaneously occurring. Grown men leaping up into the
air for rising bugs, waving their caps in an effort to snag the winged
beasts. The trout must have been laughing their asses (adipose?) off.

Bill
(Tom, does Bruce have those bug photos on a web page?)

"Wayne Harrison" wrote in message
. com...

"Mike" wrote

I have always been respectful of nature but stop and think what it
takes to make a fishery like Penns The Gunpowder The Madison Yellowstone
or you
local trickle......... Mother Nature at her finest.........

i can dig it, mike. i have often just sat on a rock in a pretty run
on
hazel creek, and just let the water run through my legs, thanking god for
the chance that i found the place.

yfitons
wayno



ah, yes, uncle wayno-
indeed; the pleasure of experiencing the water swirling around my legs,
taking in the scenery , and inhaling the fragrant air can be intoxicating.
when i go out to our streams here, particularly if it is early in the
morning, or after it has been raining, i swear i can smell every shade of
green surrounding me. and to stand in the water, and to virtually become a
part of everything around me, is a joy, to be sure.

snakefiddler

rw wrote in news:40def7c0$0$28111
:

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


Snowflake caddis, Goulburn Dec 2002. Good fish on 'em too.

BWO - May - Goulburn ... lotsa flys, drizzle, fish and fun.
Duns (probably rusty duns: it was pretty dark) february '97
Midges on the Goulburn. Struck a general rise to them a few years
back ... unbelievable -just- subsurface nymph fishing.

Alittle river: Caddis and Cicadas - things crashing into rod,
unnamed small river Dec 2003. March Flys: Jan 2004. Grey Stoneflys
in February 2004.

Christmas Beetles: Dec on the Yarra, back in 95 ' or so.
Soldier Beetles: Feb 98'

Damsel flys: Anderson's Lagoon ... summer '93 ... . You could reach down
scoop a nymph out and watch it hatch in your hand. Fish were belting
about the place seemingly chasing adults but there were no riseforms as
such: they were on the nymphs.

Caddis on some Tassie Lakes (Bradys) this season gone and last. Stickys.
Damsel flys on the Macquarie, the adults.



Steve