Late season broken weather fishing

You can probably look out your window right now and tell more about the weather than I can as I write this.

Same with river reports. I trust them almost half the time.

We don't know exactly what the next couple of weeks will bring for weather. We could be looking at wind, rain and downed trees - always a hazard.

If you're going out, be careful.

The coming week calls for broken weather - clouds, rain showers, sunshine peeking through and temps in the mildly cool high 40s on down into the low 30s.

A few days might seem too bloody cold, and others will be socked in with a cold, dull drizzle. The days that get soggier and colder as they progress toward winter are best spent indoors tying flies. Others might offer a window for getting out and fishing to remember.

We may see blue-winged olive hatches in the side channels and edges, and a last spate of October caddis.

One of the biggest fish I ever hooked on a dry fly came at this time of year on a large October Caddis pattern fished as the light descended into dusk. Those big caddisflies are still around, and the trout continue to hit them after they've disappeared.

Same with grasshoppers. Don't neglect fishing a hopper pattern and make it twitch every two seconds until drag sets in.

Broken weather during the last days of fall have yielded some of the most exciting fishing I've had in my life. Those sudden changes - sun peeking out, the letup of a rainstorm - can trigger every fish in the river into a frenzy. It may last from a few minutes to a couple of hours, but you have to be out there casting to get in on it.

If there's nothing moving on top, fish a streamer. If you've never tried it, or haven't been successful with it, it's easy to get started.

You don't need a new rod or line, and every trout in the river will chase down and eat smaller fish this time of year.

Let's say you have a four or five-weight rod, and find the idea of slinging something the size of a baby muskrat with your light dry fly rod somewhat intimidating.

That doesn't mean that you can't fish streamers. A #8, #10, or #12 streamer fished on your floating line will get you into the game, and you might score better, say, with a #8 leech pattern than a big, gaudy, bulky pattern.

I remember the time my guide client and I sat under a tall pine tree waiting out a rainstorm. When the rain ceased, the air turned from soggy to almost electric.

He wanted me to show him how to fish streamers. He had his five-weight rod with him. I rigged both of us up with a #8 Marabou Leech, and made one demonstration cast into the supposedly dead water in front of us. I was saving the heart of the pool for him.

I had barely begun my demo retrieve when a 16-inch rainbow slammed the fly and shot out of the water in an arc of spray that made its colors glisten in the brightening air.

"Wow," we both exclaimed. Neither of us was expecting that. We half-expected the fishing that followed where my client did about the same thing for the next five or six fish, all about the same size as that first one or larger, until we went on to the next run and did it again with a different fly and different retrieve.

If you have an idea where trout live and can cast reasonably well you can fish streamers. The best approach, for me anyway, is to cast quartering upstream and make the fly land above the place I expect the fish to be and let it sink a little. When the fly gets to where I think there might be a fish, I make it swim.

With a moderate sized streamer, one you can accurately cast into a place a trout might be hiding, you're into the game. Trying to muscle a bigger unwieldy fly where you can't cast it accurately simply won't work.

Get the cast in, let the fly sink to where you think a fish might be waiting and make it swim.

It's that simple, and you can build on it from there.