Graupel brings trout to surface
Help! Does anyone have a good recipe for a graupel fly? Before you Google "graupel," I'll tell you it's soft hail or snow pellets. Fishfull Faithful who watch weather forecasts on KCFI-TV are aware chief meteorologist Mark Heyka knows graupel.
So, why am I looking for a fly that imitates snow pellets? Last weekend, I hit the "Mo." In layman's terms, I went flyfishing on the Missouri River, downstream from Holter Dam.
Saturday was partly cloudy, calm. My only strikes happened when the sky was cloudy and only when fishing toilet bowls. Oops, another digression to explain "toilet bowls" refer to slow, deep-water eddies that tend to accumulate just about anything drifting down the river, including mega-numbers of insect bodies.
Why a trout would select one of my No. 20 Ray Charles flies out of the zillions of blue-winged olive mayflies trapped in the eddies, I don't know. But they did. And it was certainly a kick to shake off a miserable spring, if only for a few hours, and catch some 19-inch-plus rainbows and brown trout.
I floated from the town of Craig to the county line at Mid-Canon.
Just upstream from the confluence with the Dearborn River, there's a long, flat stretch of river where I've never had a bite, so I sat back in my personal pontoon, popped the top on a Coke and enjoyed a bag of Cheetos.
The sky was cloudy and all of a sudden a few snow pellets hit the water, then more, then more. Within a minute, there was a graupel white-out. I could barely see the 18-wheelers on I-15.
But, most interestingly, the surface of the river came alive with trout. A section of river where I'd never even seen a fish was absolutely goings bonkers with rising trout.
The graupel storm lasted 2-3 minutes, then the fish disappeared and the surface was as calm and fish-free as before the graupel-burst. Unbelievable.
Years ago, I did see kokanee salmon try to jump out of Lower Thompson Lake during a hail storm. Anyway, be sure to add some graupel flies to your fly boxes. Just in case.
As a side note, I will be teaching a two-hour fly tying class in Columbia Falls. Contact FVCC for details.