Blueless: Gin Clear, Hold the Olives
Some other hatches to watch for during the fall season
by Thomas Ames Jr.
Through my windshield, at first light, I could see a dusting of snow on the ground and a thick fog over the Ausable. It was Columbus Day, and after a week of shirtsleeve weather, daytime temperatures were dropping faster than the Nasdaq in a dot.com sell-off. Hours would elapse before the sun could melt away the morning shroud and brighten the crimson, cadmium and hot orange lining of the steep river gorge in all its full, deciduous glory. Autumn had arrived in the Adirondacks.
"If you don’t like the weather in New England," Mark Twain is alleged to have said, "wait five minutes." It’s only a slight exaggeration, most apt in the Northeast where the change of seasons is marked by the metamorphosis of its hardwoods. And where the weather is unpredictable, so are the insect hatches.
How fortunate I am to live in this region, where frosty autumn nights and warm days trigger an annual leaf show, attracting visitors from all over the world. In the clarified air, this natural dividend is compounded by its pure reflection in the surfaces of our trout waters. Sunlight rakes the landscape and lights up river bottoms with such detail that you can almost feel the bug life scurrying within. Viewed through a pair of polarized fishing glasses, the supersaturated foliage vibrates against cobalt skies.
Anglers usually associate autumn with hatches of the "olives," dainty yet abundant Baetid mayflies that emerge at mid-day and gather in the afternoon for mating and egg-laying. But there’s no need to wait for the dreary, overcast days which find these hatches at their thickest. Rain or shine, there’s a lot else happening both on and under the surfaces of lakes and streams. Dragonflies, ants, spiders, grasshoppers and many other insects, including a few stoneflies and caddisflies, all have procreative business to settle before the onset of winter. Much of this activity takes place on the water.
Not so long ago the eastern season was considered over by July. Art Flick, in his Streamside Guide, labeled summer and autumn "terrestrial and minutiae" time, and Ernest Schwiebert’s catalog of eastern mayflies in Matching the Hatch essentially ends with the summer drakes. The enormous value of Tricos and late season olives is a comparatively recent discovery. But it was these same "terrestrials and minutiae" that so fascinated Vincent Marinaro and Charlie Fox in western Pennsylvania and extended their fishing season.
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"Needle Fly" |
That’s one place you’ll find a tiny stonefly known as the needle fly. Looking for all the world like fallen spruce needles, these little brown Leuctridae, with wings that are nearly cylindrical when folded, actually owe their nickname to the color of traditional Spanish sewing needles. They emerge from July through November, but I rarely see them before Labor Day, when they appear on the banks of free flowing, tree-lined Maine rivers. After laying their eggs on the surface they become fish food, four wings outspread like the blades of a windmill. There’s no need for a special pattern. Among the spent poly-wings residing in my caddis box I can usually find just the right size and color.
Autumn’s chill brings a revival from the withering effects of the summer sun on both sides of the Mississippi, under profoundly altered conditions. In nutrient poor rivers like Vermont’s White, where heavy spring stocking and generous creel limits amount to a food subsidy, autumn trout are those wily survivors that have embraced the efficiency of selective feeding. They move upstream of the deeper pools that offered cool refuge in late summer, whereas fish in food-rich waters tend to be more spread out. Regardless, these baccalaureates have their guard up against clumsy casting or wading. Hooking them requires heightened powers of observation and presentation, and some occasional ingenuity
One overcast October episode provides a case in point. The summer had been mild, with fish and insect populations remaining healthy. Fish were dimpling the slack water both up and downstream of a deep chasm between two massive stone outcroppings. Airborne insects were sparse, but close inspection at surface level revealed hundreds of tiny olive mayfly spinners floating with upright wings.
Over the next two hours I caught numerous portly rainbows on spent spinner patterns, paying careful attention to hook size. Occasionally the sun peeked out, and feeding stopped, but when clouds reclaimed their supremacy the rises resumed. That night I tied up a half dozen size 22 olive spinners.
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A terrestrial beetle |
I needn’t have bothered. The following day I left work early and rushed back to the chasm. The fish were there, but would have nothing to do with my olives. Now the sunlit surface was littered with tiny beetles, and sizeable trout were slurping them in the shallows. Fortunately I had encountered a similar situation on a New Hampshire pond several years before and learned that a small, gold-ribbed hare’s ear nymph, treated with floatant, makes a pretty convincing beetle imitation.
The insect order known as beetles is both large and highly evolved. Of some 30,000 species, roughly 1000 are aquatic or semiaquatic. Some terrestrial varieties end up helpless on the surfaces of lakes and streams. These include ladybugs, which travel in thick society during mid autumn in search of warm winter lodgings. Almost all beetles have flat, dark, iridescent bellies and rounded protective wing coverings. A simple foam pattern in a few color variations covers most fishing situations.
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Female cinnamon ant |
Ants, unlike beetles, are strictly terrestrial. You might find trout sipping them under infested trees when clumsy, wingless workers fall into the drink, but the fast action happens when, driven to colonial expansion, swarms of winged females and their male consorts leave the nest. They have a curious, fatal attraction to watery surfaces. I once witnessed a mass suicide of tiny black ants on the Farmington River. There to oblige them were more trout than I could count, all with fussy appetites. My sole, small ant pattern vanished with the third hookup, causing great despair until I noticed that some ants drifted in clumps favored by the larger fish. A cluster midge pattern that I’ve carried around for years saved the day until it, too, was confiscated by the brute of the pool.
Winged ants migrate most often on humid days, especially after rain showers. My stream diary shows ant activity well into November. Artificial sizes range from 18 to 26 in shades of black and cinnamon. Most are constructed for a dead drift surface float.
One of the more unusual October "hatches" I’ve ever encountered turned out to be itinerant spiders riding the breeze on spun sails over a New Hampshire pond. A small ant pattern on a gossamer tippet served as a passable spider substitute.
Autumn includes among her cruel tricks an entomological red herring. The case-building caddis Neophylax lies dormant through the heat of summer. When temperatures fall it hatches profusely as the dot winged sedge. I call it the fool’s caddis, having once stood in a dot winged blizzard as they sped upstream to mate. Not one of them touched the water, and the fish ignored them entirely.
It turns out that the pupae crawl out of the water to hatch, then lay their eggs on overhanging leaves and branches. They have little to fear from fish, and very few expire on the water. So the next time you see the streamside foliage crawling with medium sized, brown fall hairwings, resist the urge to match the hatch.
All too soon, the warm days become memories, and fall fishing comes down to midges. For years I resisted fishing with anything smaller than a size 20 hook, thereby avoiding those wispy tippets that become masses of tangles after each imperfect cast. I rarely found midges in the drift of the freestone streams near home. Nor could I make myself believe that fish would prefer such tiny morsels to more substantial fare. Instead, I spent endless afternoons casting over rising fish that regarded my oversized flies with contempt. Gradually I gained familiarity with other, more distant waters, and my casting and tying skills improved. I acquired the confidence to place nearly microscopic flies into play, and the light came down from the heavens.
My epiphany came on the last day of the Vermont season, one of those crisp October days when all but the oaks and the birches have surrendered their leaves, and most of the local anglers have gone hunting. September rains had swept away the murky turbulence of summer, and I could watch a trout rise from the depths to inspect various drifting tidbits. It took my parachute emerger without hesitation and unhappily submitted to having its stomach pumped. The evidence suggested a recent diet of Isonychia nymphs and olive and brown, size 22, midge pupae, the most prevalent size and color on the rivers I fish.
There were no insects in the air when I moved upstream to Parker’s hole that afternoon. Nevertheless, just off the point where the current bends and subsides, fins were slicing the surface. These were clearly fish dining on midge pupae.
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Midge pupa |
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Midge adult |
Midges are tiny Diptera, the two-winged "true flies" that include black flies, crane flies, and mosquitoes. Like mayflies, they come in many sizes and colors, and matching them is a key to angling success.
The water at Parker’s was unusually low, with a barely discernable current. Even in high water its fish are leader shy. I entrusted an olive/brown pupa to 7X fluorocarbon tippet, hoping both would be fine enough. Casting just upstream of the nearest rise, I watched my fly land and noted a bit of adjacent flotsam to mark its drift. When a fin appeared I waited for its descent, then tightened, gently. Minutes later I netted a rainbow whose mirrored sides and green back reflected the brilliance of the autumn sky.
I fished out the season by casting to every fish in the pool, and either caught or pricked them all, losing plenty of flies in the process. I had ample opportunity to experiment and note which patterns the fish preferred.
When midge pupae reach a critical density, White River trout will take nothing else. On such streams with a wide diversity of insects but a low density of individual species, there are few such periods of selective feeding. More often the fish are sampling a miscellany of insects and can be tempted with any number of suggestive patterns. In fact, autumn is the one time of the year when I can fit all of my hatch matching needs into a single fly box. The basic inventory includes small hare’s ear nymphs, foam ants and beetles, soft hackles up to a size 12, a few spent polywing caddis and what Dutch angler Hans van Klinken calls "deep surface hanging parachute flies," of which his Klinkhamer special is the most famous. This latter group can be used to imitate an emerging midge, caddis or mayfly, or a struggling terrestrial.
