Lots of Trout Around and a Good OCC Result

The Amazing spring trout season continues.  Hendricksons arrived over a week ago. Though I haven't seen any risers, I am sure there are some to be found, especially during an evening spinner fall.  Hendrickson spinners are easy to identify because the females will have a big yellowish orange egg ball on the back of their abdomen where the tails meet.  Trout have surely been looking for the nymphs and pheasant tails have been very good nymphed on a dead drift.  We had our first trip of the season out a few weeks back.  I begin my guiding season tomorrow. We still have weekend openings as well as a few weekdays for the next few weeks of prime time fishing.

With mixed emotions, many area rivers have been stocked.  the remainder should be within the next week or so.  With so many nice wild fish around, it will be a bummer when some of the good wild fish holding areas are flooded with stockers.  Ive found that it can be hard to get to the wildfish at times like these.  If you are fishing a river with rainbows and catching only stocked fish in the deeper holes, then try some fast water or riffles dumping into the deeper water. You'll often find a wild rainbow or two there.  I say mixed emotions because there are some stretches the Fish and Wildlife stocks that do not have many wild trout and areas with stocked fish are great to target with many clients  as well as my children.  But there are some stretches that are stocked that have very good populations of wild fish and really don't need supplemental stocking, maybe just tighter creel limits.  I cannot think of a single river or stretch that gets stocked fish that does not have at least a small population of wild fish in it, so you never know what you may catch.  Lakes are also fun places to fish for stocked fish and many of those lakes cannot support a wild trout population.

Maple Country Anglers Guides fished the Otter Creek Classic this past weekend.  The Weather was great on Saturday and cool with rain Sunday.  Historically, the tournament was held during the trout opening weekend on the second Saturday in April.  This timing usually meant few fish caught and often whom ever could catch the most fish would win, which was key to me winning last year.  This year having the comp in early May meant many more fish would be caught and knowing multiple locations where large browns lived was important to win.  There were also a few rivers stocked for those looking to fill there cards, but we didn't fish in stocked areas. Our guides focused mostly on the Northern most tribs because of the driving distances from home.  Saturday was a good day for us all and lots of fish were caught.  I'd guess I hooked around 25 wild fish on the day which is outstanding for early may and cold water.  Unfortunately, I could not find any big fish during the comp.  The 24" brown I caught above was not in the comp. Bummer. The biggest fish I caught or hooked was 14".  There was a lot of fishing pressure on the rivers I was on and fishing got tougher as the weekend wore on.  I had started out catching fish on big stoneflies and mops and finished the weekend catching pretty unhappy and nippy fish on size 20 nymphs.  That was a pretty good case study on how those wild fish responded to fishing pressure.  I had around 25 on the line on Saturday and 9 on Sunday, having to really work for them both days.  In the end, not finding any big fish cost me and I was only able to manage third place, Andy took 4th and John took 8th in the pro division.  Overall a strong showing and a very fun weekend of fishing.  Now that I am  not competing on the USA Fly Fishing Team and having beat specific tournaments, I have been enjoying the format of being able to fish where ever you'd like, but local knowledge really does help when it comes to knowing where to consistently find bigger un pressured fish.  

Good luck out there.  Take advantage of the wonderful fishing.  Be prepared for any scenario, from dries, to streamers and nymphs.  The weather looks un settled everyday of the 10 day and river levels have been up and down.  There is a very good base flow because of the amount of ground water thanks to almost a year straight of ample to at times excessive rain.  The spring running into my sugarhouse has been running the fastest I've seen in 16 years. This means that while the rivers will drop with no rain it will take a fair amount of really dry weather for things to get low.  The ground water also obviously keeps rivers running cool.  I personally hope the wet weather continues, you just need to be able to make adjustments if the day you intend to fish sees too high of river flows on your first choice river.