Water Works: Caddis Conclave

by Bob Luck
My daughter decided to get married on May 3rd, and I wasn’t going to argue, even though it took nearly a week out of my fishing during the caddis hatch.  It didn’t seem worth it to pick a fight with my favorite fishing partner.  Besides, there isn’t a week between March and November when I can’t complain about missing some sort of important hatch, emergence or other important event on the stream.
The wedding was lovely and last week I was able to return to my fishing.  On Wednesday I fished a new stream in Western Wisconsin that is reputed to have big trout—both brooks and browns.  

​It also has impossibly clear, smooth water and my fishing partners and I struggled to attract fish until the caddis started hatching at around 10:30.  The hatch was heaviest right around 11:30 and we had good action on dry flies until mid-afternoon.  We didn’t catch anything over 13”, but one of my partners saw a 20-inch fish swim out from under a rock, spot him, and swim back under.  I wouldn’t call it a blanket hatch by any means, but there were a respectable number of flies on the water, and I noticed a large number of spent naturals in some puddles under a bridge.
Thursday was a carbon copy of Wednesday—warm, sunny and calm.  Perfect for a caddis hatch.  I fished the lower Kinni from 9 am to 2 pm.  I saw only a few caddis flying around the stream, and a total of two fish rising.  Dries and swung wets did nothing for me, so I entertained myself by tightlining nymphs through the riffles with my Tenkara rod.  Normally, I love this type of fishing, but I missed seeing caddis—and trout rising to them.  I have seen so-called “perfect” May days on the Lower Kinni before when few caddis were out, but I couldn’t escape a gnawing feeling that this was one more data point showing the pernicious effects of Neonicotinoid Insecticides—and other stressors—on our aquatic insect populations.
It could also be that I was fishing the wrong time of day.  Being retired gives me the luxury of fishing in the middle of the day on weekdays, and I don’t usually get around to fishing in the evening until around mid-June.  But Mike Rude told me he was in Southeast Minnesota last week and had his best caddis fishing in the hour before sunset.  The caddis weren’t hatching,  but they were hanging out near the water in a sort of “Caddis Conclave”  (see what I did there?), and the trout were eating them with gusto.  I checked into the TroutNut website, and sure enough, the Mothers Day Caddis do descend to the water to lay their eggs around dusk.  Ronald Reagan famously said of the Soviets during the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, “Trust but Verify”.  I think that applies just as well to fishing.  I trust Mike, and I even trust TroutNut to some degree, but I am making plans to spend some evenings on streams for the rest of this month so that I can verify.

Mike Rude with a 16" brown caught during the evening Caddis Conclave.