We still got mayflies

[FinsnFur]

My attempt at matching the hatch

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[Hawks Feather]

Do you get them like they do along Lake Erie?  I have been up there on Put-In-Bay when they take leaf blowers to get them off of the sidewalks in the mornings.  The ground is literally solid with them and the smell of dead Mayflies is terrible.  They have thick enough swarms that they show up as rain on the weather reports from Toledo.

Edit:  The lures look good.

[Okanagan]

That looks like something a bass or pike would hit but it doesn't look at all like any mayfly I've seen!  Who cares if it catches fish!

Our trout in much of the far west, especially Canada, don't seem as sophisticated as the ones back east, and seem to take much bigger flies and lures IME.  In remote lakes they don't see as many lures.

In a story I've told, I took an easterner purist fly fisherman after rainbows and then brookies in a couple of moosey lakes in BC.  He criticized my fly casting technique, and he was right, no doubt.  As the evening bite developed near sundown of our first day, he tied on ever smaller flies that he had tied, trying to match the swarming mosquitoes and no-see-ums I think.  I told him that big trout often feed about sundown on those lakes and that they like a big bug, more of a meal in one bite.  They often like a white wing on a big fly.  I tied on a California Coachman steelhead fly in about size 2 long shank or bigger, and soon nailed a rainbow a good 6 lbs.

The next morning we went after brook trout in my favorite moose hunting lake.  I moseyed to a nearby pond off the lake, and watched a 3 or 4 lb. brookie rise in the clear tea water and take some kind of huge bug in a closed triangle of logs floating in a tangle of brush near shore.  The open water was 3 feet across.  Any hook that went into that spot of open water would snag no matter what the retrieve, and never come back... unless it had a fish covering the hook.

I broke off my tapered leader till it was back to probably 15 lb. diameter, tied on the biggest fly I had (a massive muddler minnow the size of a shrew) and plunked it with a small splash in the middle of the triangle of open water.  Nothing happened. I waited till the water was mirror flat again and gave a tiny tug enough to quiver the fly and make tiny ripples.

The big trout rose slowly and it took all of the will power I have to not set the hook till I saw the fish's mouth close over the fly and he turned leisurely to head back down under his log.  Then I gave one big sweeping heave and before the fish could react, hauled the trout through the fringe of brush and over the log into open water on my side of the log jam. He slid right through the mess, as I hoped and expected.

The full body heave made me twist my body part way around and in the corner of my eye I noticed the eastern purist fly fisherman standing a few feet behind me, watching this vicious abuse of sophisticated fly rod and fly gear.  I started to mumble a defensive explanation but knew it was useless and was playing a big brookie at the moment so never said a word.  Neither did he.  He offered some grudgingly subdued congratulation when the trout was on shore, but never mentioned the heave ho technique.

Use enough hook!

[FinsnFur]

Jerry in May we'll get them so thick that they use a snow slow to remove them. Those show up on radar too.
The ones were getting now are just leaving small piles like wind blown leaves in the gutters and under the street lights.

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[FinsnFur]

Clyde that was layed out like a magazine article. Nice write up.
I've never fly fished. Never been interested...but your story kinda shook things lol


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[pitw]

I like this whole dang thread.

[Okanagan]

You all are describing an amazing amount of mayflies.  Hard to imaging, except that one time I got into that kind of hatch.

I was driving across the Columbia River bridge at the town of Castlegar, British Columbia just before sundown and there were so many white moth kind of bugs that the windshield washer and wipers could not keep up. 

One other time I got into a modest hatch of sedges when fishing a BC lake, but there were not hoards of bugs, just a steady supply.  Sedges look like a smallish moth to me, some with a light green body and grey wings and some with brown body and grey wings.  Feeding trout sounded like hogs at a slop trough.  We caught a bunch of identical 2 lb. rainbows, mostly by rowing slowly along and casting into the circle ring trout would make when they took a sedge from the surface.   

Hard to imagine enough bugs to show up on radar, other than a locust swarm.  You got some Biblical amounts of bugs!