TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

Let’s take a look at my San Juan flybox from my recent not-so-stellar visit to the northern New Mexican tailwater. About half of the flies in this box were tied while camped at the Crusher campground at the end of the “Quality Water”. The holdovers from previous trips include the terrestrial patterns in the lower right corner, and the purple Pig Stickers that I tied for the Big Horn in Montana. There is a row of mercury midges, small pheasant tails, RS2s and a few old scuds too.

I tied a dozen or so of these annelids in size 20 and 22 with red, pink and tan versions, but I did not get a single fish to eat one. The Mercury Midge variants were holdovers from other rivers, and those also failed on the San Juan. (And none of my San Juan Worms caught a fish!)

So what flies actually worked for me? I started off targeting rising fish that were eating emerging midges or blue wing olives, using a black cricket for a sighter fly and size 22 BWO cripple pattern. One rainbow ate the cricket and a couple ate the Olive.

The cricket got hard to see in the evening light, so I switched to drake with a black parachute post for visibility, and not surprisingly, the fish didn’t eat that. I’d tied some size 24 black midge emergers, and those were responsible for the majority of the fish I got over two weeks on the water.

I tried going without a hi-vis sighter fly for some time, using a pairing of the 22 BWO and 24 midge, and I lucked into a few hookups. A bunch of the dry fly fishing I did was in a seam along a back-eddy that had lots of foam and blobs of junk floating in it, which made it impossible to pick out my flies and frequently gunked them up. I eventually started using a stick-on indicator a couple of feet from my lead fly and that helped some.

I had tied four different leech patterns after hearing different opinions on what works. Some people think the fish will often eat blobs of algae that are full of bugs, and tie a leech that looks essentially like that. My winner was a simi-seal style leech that used an olive mix with flecks of red. On the last day I ran a mop and egg combo and 4 fish ate the mop.

All these flies should work on just about any river, but that will have to wait for next season. I’m likely done with rivers until next Spring.