I don’t get you guys. Really.

Two weekends ago, a pair of us humans fished the Upper Sac under what we both described as “pleasant” conditions.

Thanks to the selfless sacrifice of my #20 winged compadres (and an upstream reach cast), we hooked many rainbow trout.

Ahh, my BWO friends made all this possible...

Truly, we appreciate your help, though we’d like to point out we made sacrifices of our own (we accidentally left the thermos of hot chocolate at home, a travesty that still brings me to tears).

Days later, in the same sunless, cloudy-but-pleasant conditions, Chris Raine and I found more BWOs, and more rising trout.

They were very big trout.

At least three were 16″ long, and at least four others were bigger than 12″ (and those were just the ones I know about from firsthand, personal experience).

Yes, my friends, it was a very good day. And again, that was due largely to you, the BWOs (and that reach cast).

So it was with some excitement that Raine and I noticed last Tuesday’s forecast was for “Perfect” blue-winged olive weather.

Wet. Drizzly. Miserable even.

Manly stuff. To fish it, we would have to show courage.

We could not contain our child-like glee. (Admittedly, Raine doesn’t do “glee” all that well. In fact, the little dance is downright embarassing.)

We piled on the warm clothes. The rain jacket. The gloves. The gooberish hats.

And went to the river.

And stood.

In the rain.

In other words, my dun-colored friends, we showed.

But you didn’t.

Nor did the trout.

What gives?

(And why am I writing like a college Hemmingway wannabe?)

The Hemmingway-Free Zone

I’m always a little startled by the number of people who say their favorite hatch is the Blue-Winged Olive.

It’s a great bug and all, but you almost never have to compete for a spot on the river when the BWOs are hatching.

Which, come to think of it, is probably why it’s a favorite.

Right now, the Upper Sacramento remains in astonishingly good shape for February, but then, we’ve experienced an astonishingly absent winter.

The snowpack is around 30% of normal, which is not an edifying number for us small stream types.

The fishing is good, but apparently not during perfect blue-winged olive weather. (It’s going to suck next summer, when the lack of snowpack is going to hurt a lot of my favorite small streams.)

Turns out almost nothing is ever simple in nature.

The Details

Because I’m still on the clock (much Hemmingway-ish copy must be written), here are a few details:

• You can have all them fancy flies, I still live and die by my Quigley Cripples (the Engle-modified micro version) and the amusingly-easy-to-tie Roy Palm emerger (shuck, biot body, dubbed thorax ball and two wraps of blue dun hen hackle).

• On the last trip I wore my one-size-too-big Orvis wading boots, and damned if my feet never got cold, and those studs of doom gripped nicely. These puppies work as well as they did last year.

• Location is everything. The first trip, the two of us hooked eleven trout yet landed only one, courtesy an accelerating tailout current that gave a hooked trout immediate leverage against a #20 hook. Not one broken tippet or bent hook, but only one landed trout. Not breathtaking.

• As we stood in the drizzle and watched no bugs float by and no trout rise, I told Raine this would never happen to a better outdoor writer, and he allowed as to how my tendency towards complex sentences might have doomed us.

It’s hell when your own friends turn on you (hey, I’m not the one who forget the hot chocolate), but it wasn’t just us.

I spoke to local uber-guide Craig Nielsen, who has the Klamath wired and has been basically crushing them, but even he found the crushing a little slower on the same wet, “perfect” day.

Apparently, I find it comforting when others suffer with me.

The explanations are endless. Falling barometer. Rising river. BWO Christmas. Karmically disadvantaged fly fishermen.

Whatever.

Fly fishing is like that; we reach for understanding, yet the moment we think we achieved it we’re reminded we basically don’t know shit, and probably never did.

See you on the river (in the rain), Tom Chandler.