Gunnison – The man holding court over the top of a brown, longneck bottle didn’t lack for passion or conviction.
“The two biggest canards foisted upon the fly-fishing public are the salmonfly and the green drake,” he declared, waving a finger toward the waitress for another round.
I was about ready to agree with him on the salmonfly, the giant stonefly, Pteronarcys californica, also called willowfly and a lot of bad names that won’t get past my editor.
Everyone who has tried to time this hatch or find a river in early June where runoff hasn’t drowned it or simply watched fish ignore it has his own scrapbook of frustration associated with an insect whose sheer size brings it more notoriety than productivity might warrant. Disappointment, thy name is, well, whatever you want to call it.
But the drake? Who in his right mind, apart from the addling of alcohol, could speak ill of the giant mayfly that causes anglers sleepless nights for more reasons than one? Who can resist the notion of throwing large mayfly patterns, maybe even sizes 8s and 10s, to surface-slurping trout during the gentle, low-water days of late June and July?
The imbiber brushed aside that argument like someone dismissing a mosquito.
“That’s just the same side of a different insect,” he roared. “It’s just like the salmonfly. It leads you off on these wild bug chases and wastes your time.”
The man wasn’t even slurring his words anymore.
“If you want reliable insects, stick to the golden stone or blue-winged olive.”
He had a point. For every time I’ve truly connected with the big bugs, I can count a dozen when their smaller cousins rang the bell instead. Clearly, it was time to change my thinking, to place substance above size.
Yet here I was, months later, on a gently curving bend of the Gunnison River watching large, olive-tinted mayflies boil off the water like wood smoke. I pawed desperately through my fly box to find something, anything, to match them.
Green drake fever had seized me again and, once more, the trout were doing little to make me get well. For some reason – perhaps the same as last time and the one before that – the Gunnison’s brown trout ignored the surface flies.
I could see flashes of gold beneath the surface, a sure sign of trout taking nymphs, and even an occasional splashy rise where a fish had followed an emerger to the surface. But nothing resembling a rise pattern ever materialized.
“They won’t take my fly on the surface,” Phil Hancock complained from just downstream.
“Maybe we should try nymphing,” I suggested.
“I didn’t come all the way down here to fish with nymphs,” retorted Hancock, who had driven from his home near the Eagle River, where rambunctious trout probably at this very moment were doing surface fin-springs for smaller insects.
Trouble with big, juicy flies is that they’re like all those other larger-than-life events we dream about, yet only seldom are allowed to touch. Something generally gets in the way: Too much sun, howling wind, water the color of a mocha milkshake. We get there too early or too late, or find a small army bivouacked in the only spot where there’s real action.
The big stoneflies are gone for the season; the only green drake activity has moved up into the dam- cooled waters of the Fryingpan and Taylor rivers, where the plot thickens with the prospect of trout as long as my leg rising to big dry flies.
It’s almost too good to be true. I can hardly wait to pack up and go there.
Staff writer Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
