Mother's Day caddis hatch

[Al Agnew]

My buddy Missouri Tom and his two friends left Montana on Friday, after a week of mediocre at best fishing on the Yellowstone River, and better luck on DePuy's Spring Creek.  The real goal of coming to our area this time of year, the last of April, is to try to time the Mother's Day caddis hatch...and they missed it.

The Mother's Day caddis hatch is probably the most famous and sought after hatch to hit on the Yellowstone,  Timing is everything.  It takes some warm, sunny weather for it to happen, right around the last of April/first of May.  But warm sunny weather starts the snow to melting and quickly blows out the river.  So if it happens, it's the last hatch before the river blows, and you only have a very short window of time, if at all, of possible fishing.  Ah...but if you hit it right it's simply amazing.

Back in the days before we had a house out here and could stay through the entire spring season if we wished, I'd come out in this general time period with Missouri Tom, trying to time the hatch.  We hit it perfectly once.  And if I hadn't hit it that once, I'd have never believed it.  Caddis flies so thick that on a windy day, any part of your body that faced the wind as you fished would be completely covered in caddis.  They lay lime green egg cases, and any part of your waders that was submerged for a few inches under the surface would be covered completely in the egg cases, which are mildly adhesive.  Caddis on the water so thick that they formed mats that we called "caddis pizzas", with trout taking bites out of them.  The first day the hatch came off that year, the trout were so stupid, gorging themselves, that all you had to do was put on an imitation that was a couple sizes bigger than the real bugs and the trout would zero in on it.  The second day was far more caddis and only slightly less stupid trout, but by the third day the trout were gorged and fishing became more difficult.  Ah, but those first two days!  I've never seen anything remotely like it.

As I said, Missouri Tom left Friday.  Montana Tom had a friend from college days, Phil from Tennessee, coming in Friday afternoon, and he came to get the raft Friday evening.  He and Phil were going to be fishing the next three days, and he asked me if I wanted to join them.  I had stuff to do around the house Saturday, but told them I'd be able to fish Sunday and Monday.

The reason Missouri Tom had missed the hatch was because the weather had remained cold and cloudy the whole time he'd been here.  But Saturday was a sunny day with temps in the 60s.  I was working in the yard Saturday afternoon when I started to notice caddis flying around me.  I looked out over the river...lots of caddis.  I walked down to the bank and looked at the small, deep pool on our little side channel.  No bugs in the water, just flying above it.  No rising trout.  I went back to working in the yard.  An hour later, the caddis around me were getting thicker.  Again I looked at the pool.  A few bugs on the water, still no rises.  Caddis hatch, emerge quickly from the water, and mate either in midair or on the banks, then fly back over the water.  The males eventually drop to the surface and start to die, the females dip their abdomens in the water to lay eggs.  The third time I checked the river, about two hours before dark, there were trout rising.  I told Mary I was going fishing.

The riffle at the head of my side channel drops into the little pool, swirling against a low rock cliff in water 4 to 7 feet deep.  There were trout rising all along the cliff, all not more than a foot off the rock.  I positioned myself for a good cast, although the backcast, as always, would be a problem since there is a high bank and brush right behind me.  The water was murky, visibility about 18 inches, so I could didn't need to make long casts, but the pool was deep enough that I couldn't get too close to the fish.  I proceeded to get almost every trout that was rising to take a caddis imitation, and caught 12 trout, including a couple of cutthroats that were 18 and 19 inches.  Then I went down to the other nice pool in the side channel, and caught a 17 inch rainbow there, but the other fish rising in it were mostly whitefishi.  By that time it was getting close to dark and time to quit.  I texted Montana Tom and said that I hoped he and Phil had had as good a day as I expected them to have.  He posted back pictures of several nice fish they'd caught, but said they'd got them mostly on March brown mayfly imitations...the caddis had come off late in the afternoon but the fish hadn't turned on to them.

Sunday morning we didn't get on the water very early, figuring that since it was again going to be a cool day with lots of clouds, the hatch wouldn't happen until later in the afternoon.  When we started, we caught several nice fish on streamers, but then the fishing basically almost stopped.  Until a little after noon.  The sun popped out for a while and the caddis hatch took off.  Not only that, but the March browns were also thick.  It wasn't "caddis pizza" time, but at its height, you could look in any eddy and see mixed caddis and mayflies about every six inches.  And the trout, to put it bluntly, got stupid.

When the trout are in full surface feeding mode on the Yellowstone, you see why this river is so famous, and how many fish there are in it.  Any good riffle corner will have a dozen or more fish steadily rising.  Any small eddy with foam in it will have a LOT of fish just shredding the foam taking the bugs out of it.  You can stand in one good spot and take fish after fish.  You can drift down a run of smooth current against any sharply dropping bank and just cast to rises every ten feet or so, and get most of them to take.  The really big ones seldom rise to eat the bugs, but fish up to 20 inches are almost easy pickings.  It's an experience that any angler who loves dry fly fishing should have at least once.  And that's how Sunday afternoon went for us.  I have no idea how many fish we caught.  Surprisingly, at least 50% of them were native cutthroats, unusual for this section of the Yellowstone.  Geez, it was a blast.

Today, Monday, was supposed to be a little cooler.  We didn't get on the water until after 11 AM.  There were a few bugs on the water and a few fish rising, and we caught a few, but as the afternoon advanced the bugs got thicker and the fishing got better.  It wasn't as good as the day before, but had we not had the day before, we would have considered it terrific.  Tom's friend Phil had pulled off the nearly impossible...in a three day trip he'd hit the Mother's Day caddis hatch almost perfectly, with the added bonuse of all those March browns.  Dry fly fishing at its best.  And perhaps the most surprising part was that we had the river almost to ourselves all three days.  For some reason, this spring the tourist anglers haven't been coming to the Yellowstone and the locals haven't even been pounding it.  We only saw two other boats today, and one of them was two guys hunting morels on the islands.

The next two days are supposed to be warmer, with Wednesday the high up near 80 degrees.  That will probably be the last possible caddis day, since there is plenty of low snow and the hot weather will melt it quickly and blow out the river.  But maybe I'll have one more day of the caddis hatch.  We'll see.

[Matthew Peaslee]

Exciting read! Is that by chance the Missouri Tom that is enjoying the new granddaughter(s)?

[Al Agnew]

Yep, it is!

 

[Matthew Peaslee]

Neat, I need to get to a splash soon!

[Stein]

Great report and congrats on hitting the hatch. I don't second guess posting this report.  Something to be happy about given all the problems.