A Few Fish in Hand Warm Springs to Trout Creek

Although the fishing has slowed dramatically from Warm Springs to Trout Creek, I had a really fun day out with Chris and Dave that ended well with a few fish in hand.  We got a late start from the shop, not until 11am, which turned out to be a good turn of events as most of our action on the river happened after 7pm.  Although Dave is a more experienced fisherman, it was Chris who took the crown this day with the most fish to hand and caught his first ever trout!  He had another beast on as well, but learned a good "get your hand off the reel" lesson as it took a good run right at him, before quickly changing direction...the end result was a fish with a double-dry rig to deal with getting loose from his mouth.

We fished a lot of different setups, trying to get the fish to move on something, with most of our success during the middle of the day on a nymph rig with a stonefly pattern followed by a caddis pupa.  Both flies saw a bit of action, but not quite what we were hoping for.  We fished golden stone with x-caddis double-dry setups in the evening, but saw decent action on stone imitation with that setup.  Nothing on the caddis.  Also tried some dry-dropper setups with Chubby Chernobyl's on top with stonefly nymp + caddis pupa droppers.  Chubby saw the most action on that setup. 

Finally, after a long stretch of no action, we did start to see some fish coming up to the stonefly/salmonfly dries toward the very end of the day.  We didn't get off the river until well after 9pm, so we put in a full day for relatively few fish in hand.  We did see a few big caddis hatches go off in the late evening, but the fish weren't keying in on them at all.  They must still have full bellies from the last month+ of salmonflies, and were still keying in on those more than the caddis.