Stillwater Hatch Question
Hey AO!
This past Sunday I was fishing a trout lake in the Peace Country. Started out with a black leech/prince nymph (and later a dragonfly nymph) combo and started catching fish right away on both. Fish were high in the water column, with steady rises or showing themselves near the surface. Once the wind calmed down later in the day, I was casting towards rising fish and hooking into trout constantly. Switched to dry flies and foam beetles, fishing only got better. One of those "100 fish days". Probably 80% were 10" rainbows while the rest ranged from 13-19''. Fish were shallow, a couple of the larger fish came in under 2' of water. Made of fun takes!
I am still relatively new to Stillwater fly fishing, but have started to figure it out over the past two years and have had some good days. This hatch stumped me at first, there was no major mayfly or caddisfly hatches, no chironomid casings, nothing noticeable really. I hooked one trout really bad in the eye, so I decided to keep it for the smoker (I rarely keep fish but this one was not going to make it). In its stomach there was adult dragonflies, the blue ones (I forgot to take a photo)
That night, I checked out my handbook of hatches book by Dave Hughes and what I decided is that I hit a dragonfly hatch, with nymphs migrating to the shores to hatch later that evening. That's why the fish were so shallow, preying on the migrating nymphs. In his book he also mentions that he has never seen trout eat adult dragonflys, but he has seen them try to drown them unsuccessfully. I think that's what the rises and jumping was about, trying to knock down adult dragonflies then other rises were eating dragonflies which were hit. There was a mixture of trout flying out of the water and small rises/subsurface eats.
Anyways, do you think that this is correct? or am I missing something? Easily my best Stillwater day in terms of numbers. At least every 5th fish or so was a decent fish, even caught 1 nice 14" brown trout! It was an awesome day!
Thanks
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