Life After Salmonflies

I wrapped up my Deschutes trout guiding and realized I hadn’t personally fished a single day myself. So I asked Alex and Peter to join me on a quick float from Trout Creek to Maupin. They were game, so Saturday after work, we headed straight for the Deschutes. On these quick trips, my goal is to get the boat in the water and down to our first camp, hopefully before dark. We just barely made it, so we wouldn’t be getting an evening session in. 

We were up early and ready to go. We had a long day ahead of us. We were going to cover almost 20 miles of river. Making our way down through white horse and finding a camp a few miles below the reservation boundary. 

Our first stop was around South Junction. Alex started with a caddie dry and Peter with the euro. Alex had a fish eat his caddie almost immediately. I followed them through the riffle, and we all ended up catching fish.

By mid-afternoon, we were going through White Horse and starting to look for shady spots and fish-eating caddies. We were rewarded with a couple of fish eating dry flies. 

The next day was pretty much the same. Euro the riffles, dries under trees or in the back eddys. This was Deschutes fishing the way it’s supposed to be. 

On our push-out, we floated by the caretaker's eddy and saw fish rising everywhere. I rowed the seam back up to the top and parked the boat. Peter and Alex both hopped out and took turns catching fish. They were selectively focused on a PMD cripple. 

The fishing wasn’t crazy, but it was good and steady. Fish were eating everything. We fished a lot of double-dry setups, with a Superman caddie or similar in tan or olive, around size 16, and a PMD cripple in size 18 as a dropper. For the Euro setup, we fished a lot of different flies, but the Peacock Perdigon and the TNT PMD worked really well. Hopefully, this fishing will continue for a while. If you go out, make sure you fish right up till dark, as that's typically the best dry-fly fishing.