A Hatch at Last!

I heard them even before I could see the river. Splash! Kerplunk! Whoosh!

We've waited patiently(?) through a turbulent spring season, seeing some light hatches of Blue-Winged Olives, even a thin midge hatch, but the night before last was too good to miss.

I had anticipated a trial of a new (to me) pattern that I call a flashy burger, a hybrid between a woolly bugger and a slump buster. I tie it with a brass or black cone head in olive, black, or dark brown on size 8 and larger hooks. Think of a woolly bugger wrapped over by a sparse, dark, flashabou hackle. But, I simply had to tie on a large (#12) elk hair caddis when I saw the surface just popping with fish.

Renewing the Flow

The snow has finally gone, melting into the dormant grass, soil, rock crevices; now dripping off the bluffs, forming rivulets in the ditches; and, in turn, joining together with other trickles to form the brook, then the stream, then the river coursing to the sea.  Snowmelt also seeps and flows within the surface of the earth, moving slowly or imperceptibly in clays, more rapidly in gravels, loess, and alluvium until reaching impervious boundaries of bedrock. There, it hesitates until the hydraulic pressures from above move it to the surface where it bubbles forth in springs or seeps, flowing freely once again with other surface waters. Hydrogeologists call this an exorheic system in which detectable flows exit the watershed by drainage to other bodies of water.