My guide client and I were crouched tight under my portable table – we dared not reach out for any of the food we'd left on top of it. The sound of a thousand drums assaulted our ears as hailstones the weight of big round ice cubes totally destroyed our lunch.
The hailstorm slowed to silence within less than a minute after what must have been a ten minute or longer onslaught. We crept out through the hail balls piled at our feet to find my client's fly rod leaned against the leeward side of a tree, perfectly dry. Stretched out on the boat seats it would have been smashed into a row of graphite slivers.
I was stunned by what happened to our lunch as I repacked the cooler. There wasn't a trace of it left on the table – just a concocted smear of what was, just a few minutes ago, sandwich meat, salads, chips and salsa, on the ground in a slushy stain one side of the table. The snack food and fruit was still protected in the cooler; that'd have to get us by until we pulled out
What looked like rain clouds through the canopy of trees seemed a half-hour distant before the sudden ferocity of hailstones hit. Now the sky was clearing, getting sunny, and everything was silent.
We walked down to the river, kicking hailstones out of our way. After we flipped the boat to dump the hailstones out we saw a fish, then several more, boil below the surface.
"Here you go," I told my client as I re-rigged him with a #12 Pheasant Tail nymph, close enough to the underwater stage of the mahogany duns we expected earlier. "Cast across and slightly up, mend as you need to, and move it with steady short pulls. I don't think you'll need an indicator."
The fishing that followed for about the next 40 minutes was phenomenal. When it slowed a little we continued our float. It seemed that every sixteen to eighteen-inch rainbow in the river wanted to eat that nymph; some larger ones broke off.
The boils were made by fish taking the nymphs below the surface. The nymphs were swimming toward daylight after being pinned to the bottom by the barometric pressure of the storm. A dead-drifted nymph under a bobber or dry fly might have been ignored as those fish that were suddenly ravenous for live meat. They wouldn't let that nymph go for more than three or four pulls before attacking it.
Intermittent rain showers – to say nothing of that hailstorm – are part of our change-of-season weather patterns. The barometer can do crazy things through the changes. The fishing can pick up when a steady rain hits or go to pot. Or it can pick up when the sun is out, and quit when it goes behind a cloud. Or vise-versa.
The one thing that seems to hold for certain in broken weather is that the fishing picks up – and can go completely berserk – when a storm, even a little one, lifts.
When the sun comes out and there's no hatch on the water, put on a nymph – and move it. The rising barometer makes trout think they're hungry and they go on the prowl. And whatever nymphs might be hatching tend to get active at the same time, triggered by barometer and sunlight.
It had been cloudy and rainy all day when another client and I leaned against a tree by the river waiting for the worst of an all-day rain to lift. When the rain slowed the clouds remained heavy. Soon it would rain hard again. But during that interlude where the rain was softer yet incessant and very wet we fished. There was no hatch that day. In amonth we might see blue-winged olives, but not now.
The day was dark with overcast. Leeches, present in every trout stream, come unbuttoned from their rocks or vegetation on the bottom and swim around taking in phytoplankton and other food from dusk to sunset and on dark stormy days. On those days a very simple olive, brown, or black #8 Marabou Leech can be an angler's best friend.
I rigged my client up with a black one, showed him an itchy-twitch retrieve that keeps the fly moving, and watched him land several strong rainbows and cutthroats on his next few consecutive casts.
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