Caddis, a window of angling opportunity

There’s a window of angling opportunity on the Yellowstone River I hope to slip through this spring, a time of exceptional fishing that’s here and gone so quickly it often goes unnoticed.
Catch it right and you’ll mark it on your calendar as the very best time to fish the river. Miss it by a day and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. The window can slam shut overnight.
The Mother’s Day caddisfly hatch on the Yellowstone doesn’t always occur on Mother’s Day. Some years it’s already over by then. Not that the bugs are gone, but the opportunity to take advantage of the trout feeding on them has disappeared in the rising brown torrent of spring runoff.
The river won’t be fishable again until summer.
But catch it right …
After launching your boat in the morning somewhere above Livingston, you begin to notice a few bugs in the willows along the bank. Then the day warms and clouds of caddis begin to fill the air. Rafts of dead bugs swirl in the eddies and pepper the scum lines. Trout feast eagerly on the first big bug hatch of the year.
You can actually hear them feeding.
Drift an elk-hair imitation along a current seam and watch it vanish in a splash, rod bowing to a fighting fish, line cutting through the glassy surface of the river.
Rainbows, browns and cutthroats, along with mountain whitefish, all feed with equal abandon.
Sink a caddis emerger next to a cut bank, see the line go taught, raise the tip of the rod and a rainbow comes flying out of the river. Or maybe it’s a brown or a cutt that goes racing downstream. Again and again.
Caddis flies get down the collar of your shirt, on your glasses, in your mouth. But you don’t care. You’re too busy catching fish.
The hardest part of it all is keeping track of your fly among the swarms of real bugs on the water.
You go to sleep that night with visions of rising fish in your head and dream of doing it all over again tomorrow.
But when you get back to the river the next morning the window has shut. The off-color water of yesterday has turned an opaque brown and while caddisflies still fill the air, there are no fish rising to feed on them.
At least you had yesterday.
That’s why I keep my options open the last week of April and the first week of May, hoping for a chance to slip through that window of angling opportunity.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net