By Dennis Smith –
I’m not a winter fly-fishing fan, but a few years ago during one of those pleasantly weird, weeklong February thaws we sometimes get around here, I found myself on the Big Thompson with a fly rod in my hand. Daytime temperatures had peaked in the 60s for so long that tulips were beginning to sprout in our garden, cottonwoods were budding all over town and every lick of shelf ice on the river between Estes Park and Loveland had completely vanished. It wasn’t yet Valentine’s Day, but it felt like spring. The weather was so inviting I couldn’t help myself, so I grabbed my waders, rod and vest and headed for the river to see if I could catch a trout or two.Midge flies — the two flies with the long tails (at 10 and 11 o’clock in the photo) — mimic stuck-in-the-shuck cripples; the rest imitate yet hatched pupae. The cripples are easier for trout to catch.
I parked at a turnout just west of town to string up my rod and pull on my waders. Flows here are generally too low to hold fish during the winter months, particularly if the irrigation companies are pulling water off at one of the diversion structures farther upstream. Still, it’s a good place to pull over, suit up and work the wrinkles out of your line before heading upstream to more productive waters. Occasionally, though, a good head of water comes downriver and, if it holds for more than a few days, trout will mysteriously begin to appear in the long, flat pool there. Where they come from is anybody’s guess.
I couldn’t tell you why, but they were in there that day as thick as fleas on a junkyard dog. Not only that, clouds of midges were boiling out of the riffle at the head of the pool and the trout were on them like sharks on a wounded tuna. Naturally, I figured catching them would be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
It wasn’t. I tied on a Griffith’s gnat (a tiny dry fly known to fool trout during midge hatches exactly like this one) and crept down the bank. I began casting and immediately proceeded to not catch fish. Thirty minutes and several fly changes later I hadn’t hooked so much as a single trout.
I’ll spare you the ugly details, but it wasn’t until after I spent three hours not catching anything that I finally figured out those fish weren’t feeding on the winged adult midges after all. They were singling out and eating only those insects that had partially hatched and lay trapped in the surface film, struggling to free themselves from their pupal cases.
Experienced anglers call these imprisoned insects “cripples” or “stillborns” and know how to mimic them with their flies. Trout apparently find the stillborns easier to catch than winged adults and will often feed on them to the exclusion of all others. They’re easy pickins’, so to speak.
I mention this because I suspect we’re due for one of those pleasantly weird February thaws anytime now. But if you’re headed out to fish the midge hatches, don’t think that just because the weather’s nice and the trout are jumping all over the place, catching them is going to be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.