Flying Into Spring Never Mind The Weather; When Stoneflies Rise On The Region’S Rivers, It’S Time To Go Fishing With Dry Flies

Squalls in the valleys. Skwalas on the rivers.

It’s time to layer on the fleece and dig out the dry flies.

Just don’t head into the fickle March weather thinking you’ll be the first angler to take advantage of the season’s first stonefly action.

For more than two weeks, a few Western Montana fly-fishing guides have been in hog heaven.

Big trout have been looking up from the depths of the Bitterroot and Clark Fork rivers while most fishing clients were still waiting for warmer weather.

“This is a choice time to fish,” Peter Vandergrift said last Friday, the same day 7 inches of snow fell on Mount Spokane. “The trout are rising and virtually nobody is on the rivers.”

Vandergrift and Drew Miller, two guides who work out of the Grizzly Hackle fly shop in Missoula, were going to take advantage of their idle time that day, knowing that anglers soon would be in a frenzy to book trips.

The young guides had been capitalizing on clear schedules the previous day, too, as one could tell by the wet wading boots in their rigs.

“We slammed some really big ones,” Vandergrift confided to Miller as they huddled in a shop corner.

Serious anglers are as anxious as the trout for the first sign of adult Skwala stoneflies. “Most guys like to see a little better weather,” said Miller, looking at the gray skies out the fly shop window. “But the trout don’t wait.”

“This is the time of year when guides’ girlfriends go crazy,” one fellow in the shop said. “They’re out fishing like crazy, and you never know when they’ll be back.”

The talk in shops from Spokane to Missoula was infectious last week.

“Two guys came in and said they hit a great Baetis hatch on the Clark Fork in the middle of a snowstorm,” said Brooks Sanford of Clark Fork Trout and Tackle in St. Regis, Mont.

Hatching mayflies on good trout water are always a welcome sight to a fly fisher. Adult stoneflies, however, can cause disorders among fly fishers ranging from bladder dysfunction to divorce.

The Skwala is the trout’s harbinger of spring.

It’s the first meaty morsel to swim the surface of the low, clear Montana rivers before the streams blow out with spring runoff.

“The big trout have been midging all winter,” Vandergrift said. “They’re eager to come to the surface when these babies are out.”

They launched Miller’s drift boat near Hamilton, Mont., well after noon.

“The dry fly action has been starting about 1:30,” Miller said, looking at the snow squalls churning just a few hundred feet above the valley floor in the Bitterroot Mountains.

They took turns in the bow of the boat, where the angler would fish until he scored three strikes before trading places with the man at the oars.

They traded often.

The water temperature was frigid, and the air temp in the 40s, yet the fishing action never cooled.

Vandergrift had started with a small bead-head nymph on a dropper dangling from the hook of a big Skwala dry pattern. After two quick hookups, he did away with the dropper, all the better to make pinpoint casts in the current seams along the Bitterroot’s banks, which are notoriously lined with cottonwood snags.

“The ‘Root is a fairly easy river to read,” Miller said. “Fish generally are where they’re supposed to be, on seams and under banks where they wait in ambush. But you’ll also find them out from the bank and in mid-river below dropoffs.”

In the next hour, they proved all of that, catching various species -browns, rainbows and cutthroats- in various types of water.

But the most productive portion of the river was along the bank, where the real thing could be seen fairly regularly drifting downstream.

Like other stoneflies , Skwala nymphs crawl up from the river bottom, out of the water and onto the banks, rocks or snags.

Adult females emerge from their shucks with wings (the males are wingless), yet they aren’t known to fly much, probably because of the cold, early-season weather in which they’re active.

After mating, the olive-brown females plunk into the river to lay their eggs. Since they don’t fly, the Skwala’s don’t skitter on the water like huge Pteronarcys californica salmonflies that emerge in June.

Skwalas do run the river in a dead drift with occasional twitches.

“Sometimes a little mend gives just enough movement to generate a strike,” Miller said.

“By May, the trout have seen a lot of imitation flies,” Vandergrift said. “Right now, it seems like most patterns work.

By May, you want something green and different.”

The pair beached the drift boat and stalked off for a brief interlude to cast midge patterns at delicate rises in the foam of an eddy.

Vandergrift tied on what he called his Bar Fly: “Everything hits on it.”

Their curiosity satisfied, they soon were back to the big bugs, which seemed to be the preferred meal for the big trout.

Every rainbow they caught that day was at least 15 inches long.

They negotiated the river’s low-flow channels like the pros they are.

They enjoyed seeing the geese nesting in snags where ospreys will follow, and the work of beavers that have toppled the cottonwoods that will become new trout hideout’s after spring runoff.

They saw only one other fishing boat.

“As good as the fishing was today, it only gets better,” Vandergrift said. “Unfortunately, by that time, I’ll be running the oars, not a fishing rod.”