I was enjoying new faces at a bed-and-breakfast happy hour in Plymouth, California, home of the Amador County Fair, the Shenandoah Valley wine appellation, and great ranch-pond and reservoir bass fishing. During cocktail hour chat, we found that our new friends were there for the same reason: dinner reservations 45 minutes later at a famous wine country restaurant and foraging for revered Shenandoah Valley barbera wines. As often is the case, conversation with a glass of wine in hand led to discussions of travel, fishing, and then fly fishing.
It turned out that the male half of both couples were avid anglers and often traveled chasing fish and adventure. Before walking the short distance to our restaurant, we found that much of our planning for fishing trips — locally, regionally in California, in the West, and internationally — was targeting annually repeated natural events that concentrated fish, put them on the bite, and led to angling success, often spectacular, if you hit it right: windows of opportunity. My new weekend friend said that a business emergency had recently caused him to miss a window of opportunity for tarpon in the Yucatan. Lodge booking deposits were lost, airline ticket refunds compromised, and a much-anticipated trip had to be put on the shelf for next year.
In his case with the tarpon, the window of opportunity was the alignment of tides, winds, water temperatures, storm routes, and the arrival of the fish. My own most recent opportunities were attempts at catching the Fall River Hexagenia hatch and the beginning of the summer runs out of Klamath Lake into Oregon’s Williamson and Wood Rivers, catalyzed by warming lake water.
Returning home a few days later, I found a phone message from another new friend and member of our local fly-fishing club, the Gold Country Fly Fishers. Having relocated from Southern California within the year, he was interested in my thoughts regarding local fishing as we moved into the doldrums of summer and then into the fall. We met for lunch, and I returned home to make sense out of my ramblings and write down some thoughts. I realized that again, much of our discussion centered on windows of opportunity.
I remember a phone call from the late Jay Fair. It came in during working hours and fit into the “most urgent” category, which could include a call from my wife, a family emergency, or relate to a tennis date or important angling. Jay wanted me to come up immediately for the fishing at McCoy Flat Reservoir. The fishing was red hot, and the trout were “on the grab.” I remember asking, “What does ‘immediately’ mean?” He replied, “Leave now, and we fish in the morning. You can be here by two a.m. It could be over in a day or two.” Sadly, I had to turn Jay’s invitation down. Early in my career as a dentist, I made a rule never to cancel a patient on short notice, and I stuck to that rule.
I remembered him talking about this window at McCoy Flat a few years earlier. For the reservoir to fish well, there had to be at least two good water years in a row, and success depended on planting schedules based on water conditions and prognostications. Optimal calcium carbonate levels in the reservoir, a product of the volcanic soil near Mount Lassen, promoted phenomenal insect and fish growth. There was a short window before elevated temperatures and lowered oxygen levels drove the acclimated and fat holdover fish deep.
Steelhead anglers know about windows of opportunity all too well — the narrow interval when water and clarity levels between winter storms allow successful fishing. Some keep a “go bag” packed should they get the call. With cell phones, stillwater anglers can get that call from someone in an inflatable pontoon boat out on the water or an emailed photo of a trout taken by a proud and competitive angling friend. Or a photo showing hundreds of seagulls facing out on a Lake Davis point could signal that damselflies are moving in numbers that attract fish and birds.
Early in my angling years, I fished the Hat Creek area with André and Sara Puyans in late May and early June. They were great mentors, teaching patience along with meticulous fly-tying skills and stream tactics, and the week-long parade of stories told in camp were memorable. The food wasn’t bad, either. We fished the early morning rise at Hat Creek, returned to camp at Cassel for breakfast, then took float tubes to Baum Lake, looking for little windows of opportunity. The first window on Baum was a subtle Trico hatch where the water from Hat roars down the twin penstocks, slows, and flows in a gentle current into Baum. The tiniest sipping rise could be a huge brown trout sucking in a size 22 black-bodied, silvery, down-wing tidbit.
When the hatch faded, for a change of pace as well as of fly size and tippet diameter, we used our tubes with an assist from a circular current to work the upper and east sides of upper Baum with grasshopper patterns as rising air temperatures brought late morning and early afternoon breezes. We used the wind and current to approach stealthily what could be very large fish.
In California, the geography and the length of the state give anglers many windows of opportunity. On the western slope of the Sierra and the “other side” that many of us refer to as the Eastern Reach, altitude and latitude open opportunities. The midlevel lakes rarely freeze over and fish well into late spring and early summer before warming waters and depleted oxygen levels change things. Our local fly shop in Grass Valley advises anglers to carry carpenter ant and termite patterns, because we get ant flights on lakes and streams anywhere from late March into May. Trout and smallmouth bass go nuts when this happens and work coves, points, and even open water simultaneously. This phenomenon moves upslope with warming temperatures, peaking in June, and the ants fly again in September and October. You can’t predict the day, but if you’re out a lot, you may stumble onto the window of opportunity and have a chance at exciting fishing.
The stillwater fly boxes of my friends and I contain ants and cinnamon termite patterns. Black ants go down to size 18. I carry Hi-Vis-posted parachutes in red, rust, and black from size 14 down to size 18. They sit low in the water, like a drowned or struggling ant. Other patterns include cinnamon termites and carpenter ants in sizes up to 10.
One of my a favorite encounters with a window of opportunity involved a frustrating autumn incident at Webber Lake. Four of us drove up and paid the discounted private stillwater fee, fishing out of two pontoon boats and one skiff. We spread out, looking for fish, entranced by noisy and colorful sandhill cranes on a southern spit. At about 10:30 a.m. on a chilly day, aided by a gentle offshore wind coming out of the lakeside forest, cinnamon termites started falling from the sky, first a few here and there, then in prodigal numbers. Trout from all over that end of the lake quickly found them. We changed flies several times, getting refusals, in spite of a feeding orgy that turned our fingers into jelly as we tried to knot on new patterns. Trout can be very selective when feeding on ants or termites, especially in clear alpine lakes.
My partner, the late f ly-tying angler and author Jim Cramer, finally connected with one of his size 14 clear-wing rusty-colored caddisfly imitations. I got refusals on my High-Vis brownish-bodied ants. He passed me one of the his flies, and I was soon into a beautiful trout.
A feeding melee surrounded us, with radiating rings of rises spreading out and overlapping each other, accompanied by the slurping splashes of large fish. Then an obese woman, in a far too tight bathing suit, came our way in an overloaded kayak that soon capsized. When the kayak rolled, she went into the water, which at 7,100 feet on a chilly morning was frighteningly cold.
The rule of the road is that you offer assistance, regardless of the circumstances, even during an ant mating swarm. She was reluctant to accept help, but grabbed my skiff’s bow as I slid in toward her. Together, Jim and I would never have been able to lift her from the water, and if we had, our small boat would have capsized. I slowly backed to the western shore,
the stand of trees that had launched the termite flight, and swung the bow, careful to not get her anywhere near the prop, to where she could stand. Out of the corners of our eyes we could still see the haze of the termite flight and still hear rising fish. We watched her wade to shore and leave, assured by a hand wave that she was OK when she entered a lakeside camp and was thrown a towel. Our rescue seemed to last an eternity, but probably didn’t take more than 10 or 12 minutes.
Jim muttered, “It’s not over till the fat lady sings,” so we idled out 75 yards to the center of the termite swarm and killed our engine. We each took just one more fish, and then the window of opportunity closed as quickly as it had opened. Another window of opportunity, farther south on the eastern side, is the annual perch fry hatch at Crowley Lake. Illegally planted in the 1960s, Sacramento perch, a native fish in the Central Valley, thrive at Crowley, where they add to the protein biomass that grows huge fish. The perch fry hatch occurs in summer when many lakes turn off and is fishable
in water from 2 to 15 feet deep using classic cast-and-retrieve streamer tactics with intermediate clear and camo sink-tip lines of varying sink rates. Clear intermediate lines may have too much memory, but they seem to catch wary fish from clear waters. Punk Perch fly patterns can be fished under an indicator in combination with damselfly and Callibaetis nymphs and reliable chironomid patterns such as an Albino Wino or Zebra Midge.
Yet another window of opportunity found in fertile lakes involves the Blood Midge hatch. I first encountered it at Martis Lake, California’s first catch-and-release still water, then at Lake Davis, and later at Sawmill Lake, a private impoundment at 7,000 feet at the Northstar ski resort. Ralph Cutter’s Martis Midge used to be a popular fly in Truckee fly-shop fly bins, but Martis Lake has declined, probably due to siltation, excessive aquatic weeds, and a drop in the water level related to dam safety.
I have encountered prodigal Blood Midge hatches at Sawmill Lake, Lake Davis, Frenchman Lake, and a few others, but although they are cyclical, they are somewhat unpredictable. Still, as with ants, you might be lucky or just guess right and therefore should carry proven patterns in your fly boxes, since they repeat year after year. Anglers who fish many days a year are the ones who figure out these opportunities. Blood Midges are bigger than the midges fly fishers typically come across, and become larger at more northern latitudes, as do almost all midges.
There are huge hatches that bring unbelievable numbers of fish up to feed on the emerging pupae. I remember a July morning at Davis when we caught few fish, followed by an unusual afternoon when the wind and lake were dead calm,
beginning around 5:00 p.m. We were headed for Cow Creek from the east side after an early picnic dinner, just trolling flies at an idle, in no hurry, because we expected activity much later. First there were a few swirls far out from shore, then thousands of them. The fish refused our guesses at what pattern to fish. Finally I took a few trout on an old fly, a Sandy Mite, bought when Evelyn Gamble was tying at her small Portola hardware and sporting-goods shop.
When you encounter a window of opportunity such as this one, there can be so many fish feeding that it is hard to get a fish to pick out your artificial from among legions of naturals. Overnight, I tied a few flies that I thought would work and put three flies on a leader trace to narrow the odds. Conditions the next afternoon were identical . . . at least we thought so. We sat there until dark without seeing a worthy rise. Windows of opportunity close, as well as open.
My preferred pattern for sight fishing during Blood Midge hatches has been Craig Mathews’s Serendipity, which evolved from a Russ Marigold f ly that borrowed from British midge patterns. The body is tightly twisted brown, red, or green Zelon, with a tiny flared deer hair bullet head. I believe it was tied years ago as a caddis pattern for fishing the Madison in Montana.
I carry the Punk Perch, Mercer’s Poxyback Callibaetis, Martis Midge, Spotlight Emerger, Hi-Vis Ant, Cramer’s Termite Caddis, and legions of other patterns, chasing the stillwater windows of opportunity. My serious fly-fishing friends do the same and are driven to tweak their patterns to come up with new flies that will work when those windows open. If you fish still waters, at some point you’ll come across a feeding spree. Be prepared for it.
