Hopper Madness

Slough Creek is a special place. There are not many creeks where you can watch large, native cutthroats cruise around in search of food. In fact, Slough Creek is the only creek like this that I've seen. The trout act like they are in a lake as there is little current in many places. The morning started off slowly with only one fish in the first couple hours. In was particularly still section large cutts were cruising picking off spruce moths from the surface. We thought we had the right fly, but there was one problem...our flies wouldn't flutter and flap their wings. The only bugs we saw get eaten were flapping their wings and try as we might we couldn't replicate this.

As the sun warmed the meadow up and the wind started blowing we notice grasshoppers begin to fall into the water. This sent the fish into a frenzy. Not a striper attack everything craze mind you, but a Slough Creek cutthroat craze. The fish would still slowly rise, inspect and then slowly take the grasshoppers, but they began to lose some of their caution as they got greedy. This was good for us and led to several nice trout brought to hand. Britt caught a nice 16" fish, PJ caught several nice fish and had a couple very large fish just elude him and I managed to catch some nice fish. The order of the day was still to have more fish look at the fly and maybe nudge it before moving on. The other problem we encountered was a lack of patience. When an 18" trout slowly swims up to your fly and opens his mouth it is hard to remember to wait to set the hook. The British fisherman who fish stillwater say "God Save the Queen" in their mind before setting the hook. This same theory can be applied to Slough Creek. I try to wait for the fish's head to turn down. Unfortunately, this thought eluded me on the nicest fish I had rise all day, but it's a lot easier to take this when you know just around the bend there are trout just as big to cast to.