The Trico

early morning
coffee
ridiculously small dry flies
12 foot leader to 6x
bugs everywhere
fish rising in steady rhythm

That's kind of the list that can describe a trico outing. Relatively new to me, being that I have to date always leaned on the nymphing crutch. The more I get to know our SE MN hatches though, the more intriguing they are and the more enjoyment I get out of fishing our landscape.

Sunday morning around 6 AM I got a thump on the window from friend and BWCA partner Andy, at Canning Chronicles. Fifteen minutes early he was - I liked that and it turned out to be critical. We pedaled south to a somewhat-tucked-away-but-not-ridiculously-secret-reach-because-none-are section of one of the blue ribbon waters of The Driftless Area. No one present, despite the fact that the famed trico hatch has been on for some time now. We lined one rod, thinking we'd take turns, and set off... on our heels a gold minivan from Iowa pulled up. We didn't look back - trekked down to a sweet little hole that I knew of... and right away saw bugs in the air and fish rising. It didn't take long to get into some very fascinating and very enjoyable fishing. The recent rain had driven this stream to a peak the day before, but it was already receding and plenty clear. The tricos were in the air from ~730 to near 900 on the dot. There was a clearly a time at which they disappeared. After that time, we could still pick up a fish or two using the same patterns.

Regarding those patterns - we had #20-22s that I had tied up over the previous nights. Some were hack jobs but some were decent. A number of them caught fish. The one pictured in the previos post fished pretty well.

Later in the morning we switched to a variety approach: hoppers, beetles, black wet flies. A little bit of action on each of those was what we got.

We never pinched a split shot on the tippet, nor did we use a strike indicator. No tandem rigs. Straight up one dry fly all day. Pretty satisfying. Steady action. We each caught our share of fish and Andy went home with enough for a meal. For me, two things stand out about this trip: (1) enjoyment of fishing with a good friend (usually I'm a hermit out there) and seeing him catch fish, (2) the fascination in watching these bugs and watching the fish eat them... and thinking how easy and cool it would be to stand at this one great reach all morning and do nothing but try to catch every fish rising in it.

Some streamside bergamot - same species we have in our garden - good for a chaw here and there:
The fly, despite being extremely small, is too big. Still worked. Note is taken though. Pardon the fingers - black walnut stain.

The bugs - the first pic was a cloud of them - you can kind of make it out. Note that the tail is pretty long relative to body.






Andy brings one to hand...

...as the swallows look on and the limestone that is the defining feature here gets another day older.