The clouds dropped towards the water like a Soviet-grey garage door. It had already been cold, April in Alaska after all, but now came the rain—big, heavy drops that I could feel through both Gore-Tex and fleece. A good drenching, however, seemed the natural consequence of having gotten up at all today. In fact, wet skin, numb fingers and forgotten toes feels like a corollary of getting into trout in the first place.
There are two reasons for this: one, all freshwater gamefish, the crimson-sided members of Oncorhynchus mykiss included, are photosensitive to some degree. Wind, sleet, a gentle drizzle to outright three-day Alaska rain—they all accomplish the same thing, chopping the water’s surface, lowering visibility and making fish feel safer.
The second reason comes down to a pair of facts—a) I live and do the vast majority of my fishing in the Last Frontier, where from certain perspectives ‘summer weather’ can be seen as a purely notional concept, at least if blue skies and 80s are any kind of ideal; and b) I’ve never seen any need to observe seasons at all when it comes to trout.
In Montana, where I grew up, the summers were good enough but there were also midges to fish in December and January, and if things went right, a trip to the cousins’ in the Bitterroot Valley that coincided with a February hatch of the skwala stoneflies. Still, there’s also a time that falls between the skwalas and the various Mother’s Day caddis festivals that signal the start of another summer’s angling, a period of the year distinguished mostly by the BWO, which stands for blue-winged olive but might as well mean Bad Weather Only.
Mayflies from the family Baetidae, blue-winged olives are the cause of some amount of debate among the more anal entomologist-types, though I’ve never known exact classification to matter that much on the water. Most anglers just refer to the whole group as Baetis mayflies, with a few going as far to differentiate the pseudos of the genus Pseudocloeon, for me a question only important in knowing whether to go with a size 18 or size 22 Cripple.
At any rate, from September through April, blue-winged olives of all genera hatch on a large number of western rivers, and in numbers enough to cause selective feeding. The hatches are strongest mid-February through early April in most places, and at that time, they can become a staple of the trout diet. On the other hand, it’s an unreliable and unpredictable hatch, particularly as ideal blue-winged olive weather usually comes as part of a package with the big spring storms. This is also part of the reason these events can provide such good fishing—the bugs tend to hatch in the same hideous weather that makes their wings dry slowly, which keeps them stuck to the water and available to the fish longer. For the angler, this means sitting around during the spring and annoying friends and neighbors by actually hoping for a falling barometer and the attendant damp, chilly outlook to the day at hand. Then to the dry flies.
As a result of all this, the state of the fishing—especially spring fishing—has almost always gone hand in hand with the level to which the weather has deteriorated. Now that I live in Alaska, where some amount of wet misery is just par for the angling course, I don’t need the mayflies to get me out beneath the leaden skies for a round of early-season cast-and-retrieve. Foul weather, two layers of Capilene, fingerless gloves and on-the-hour shots from the flask—it’s just fishing up here, no more exclusive to spring than enormous streamers.
And so the constant fogging of my sunglasses does not surprise or bother me. Soon enough the rain breaks through the barrier of my hood and ice-cold droplets stream down my face. I zip my jacket to my nose and cast just beyond the mix-line, letting the leech begin its swing. There are no nibbles, short strikes or head shakes—the fly is swinging freely one second and in the next fly line is headed for the middle of the Su. I can’t palm the reel because my hands are too cold, and so I just stand there and wait, rod bowed almost double, wondering why anyone would put off fishing until summer. There are plenty of trout like this out here, and for some reason, it feels better to catch them if you’ve suffered a little.
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