I wrote once about my belief that the dead of winter is the cruelest time for any trout fisherman. You’ve got the near-lethal cold, the weeks upon weeks until the first mayflies might hatch, and the painfully short bursts of sunshine amid marathons of gray.
I still believe all that. But this spring and summer are unleashing a new kind of cruelty, an unfamiliar pain buried under layers and layers of tea (or coffee) colored water. Runoff is a painful time any year. The fishing gets good pre-runoff and the blue-wing olives hatch predictably. It’s the waking of the fishing season and it certainly helps remind a fly fisher he is a live after a long Rocky Mountain winter. If you are lucky you might hit a Mother’s day Caddis hatch and it almost feels like summer for an evening or two. You can see the season spread out before you like map on a kitchen table with a dozen unexplored blue threads calling your name.
Then runoff hits and puts everything on hold. Water is high and muddy. Bugs are gone into hiding trying to survive, fishing is there to be had but it can be dangerous and it’s not the small fly disappearing beneath the head of a trout that pre-runoff fishing can be.
Still, runoff is a temporary event, and every fisherman knows that once the water drops the fishing will be fantastic. The bugs will come back and the trout will be hungry and aggressive in the cold, oxygen-filled water.
Except this year.
This year it is tough to know just when runoff might end. And its tough to know how the fishing will be once the flows do finally recede. I wasn’t here for the record flows of ’97 (which seems to be the best comparison for this year’s water situation), so I don’t know how the local waters fished once the floods subsided. I do know that for the next month or so, I suspect that other than a few tailwaters and some spring creeks, most rivers will be much higher than usual.
I’m okay with that, of course. More water generally equals more and bigger fish (though I suspect there is a ceiling to that particular platitude). I am expecting a fantastic year on the lakes, where the water temps should stay cold with fresh snowmelt unless we hit a real hot spell. And I do think that August and September might be banner versions of themselves this year.
But where does that leave us? Faced with an altogether strange June and July, I suppose. And these months are the meat and potatoes of trout fishing in the West. Hence, this strange cruelty I mentioned earlier.
It isn’t often western fly fisherman are faced with a summer in which they don’t really know what to expect. But here we are. So the best we can do is just to roll with it. If everything went just as we planned, I doubt this fly fishing business would be worth all the fuss.
