Finally, a dry fly evening

The heat of summer comes to the Seattle area long after desperation deflates even the memory of what a stinging sun can feel like on your skin. We sit out here in the remote lefthand corner of the USA reading about the drought and searing heat of regions far away. We fly fishermen put down the paper and drive through the wet blanket warmth that is our summertime. We pull on GoreTex waders and fish icy rivers that swell with rain and then snowmelt through July.

And then an evening like last night happens.

The heat on my car thermometer showed 89 at about 7:15 pm (today's Seattle Times records 92). The Cedar River was down to 230 cfs. Remember that early in the fishing season I caught a Cedar River cutt at 800 cfs.

After a neighborhood pig roast, I arrived on the river at about 8 pm and the light was fine but quickly diminishing. I chose a section of the river that was easy to access from the trail but hidden from view. It had a relatively shallow bank and then deep pools toward the center of the river where the flow was steady but not too strong. I climbed over a few large boulders and sat atop one about 10 yards out into the stream. There I had good room for my backcast and could see the surface of the water in the twilight.

I had a small nymph tied on already and I cast that a few times. Nothing. Thanks to the piles of reading I've done throughout the season, I quickly realized these were the right conditions for dry flies.

I tied on a cahill or something like a pale morning dunn. Without even trying very hard I had an 8 inch cutt. The fish in this river, no matter their size, will fight like nobody's business due in large part to the cold water and good oxygenated flows. I cast a few more times in the same area and brought in some larger cutts, maybe 10 inches.

I began to notice good rises in the middle of the river so I cast out there, mending my line in the air so that the fly got a nice long drift with the flyline behind the fly thus avoiding the drag of the current.

The fish were clearly hungry, rising for my fly on nearly every cast. Within a few minutes I had a hard strike and a good sized rainbow on the line. I have stopped stripping in line for every fish I catch and have gone to reeling them in, which is more fun and has the added advantage of not having flyline all over the water once they're netted.

The 11-12 inchers are not fat but they are meaty and colorful. Whereas I failed time and again to set the hook on dry flies earlier this summer, this time my timing and technique seemed to work. I used smaller hooks (size 18) and I waited a little longer to raise the rod. The result was 4 rainbows caught, each about 30 feet out in the stream on rises to my dry fly. I used both the cahill and an Elk Hair Caddis.

Walking back to the car in the near-darkness, I talked with a couple of other fly fishermen who were also loading up to head home. They had not done so well using streamers. The habits of sub-surface fishing die hard, even in the blaze of summer.

The first photo below is a cutt in the net. The second is very dark but you can make out one of hte 12-inch rainbows.