Welcome to my 2011 Newsletter. You can view fly photos at www.richosthoff.com.
Printed fly photos can be mailed on request. My web site also has information
on my books, spring creek guiding and schools, speaking programs, and more,
including a new photo gallery that will be up by early 2011.
Major flooding in recent
years has created excellent spawning habitat across the Driftless Area. I’ve
never seen so many young browns in Wisconsin spring creeks; adult trout
populations should be sky high in 2011 and beyond.
The 2010 season saw warm days
and almost no rain from mid March through April. Most insect hatches cycled
early and quickly, but nymphing remained strong all season. Late May thru
September brought frequent storms and roiled water that made for excellent
‘swing’ fishing (cast a bugger or nymph down and across, and slide the fly back
across current on a tight line, giving dirty water trout time to detect and
take). The rains kept small headwaters flowing strong and flushed of weeds and
silt; I found fast action and solitude for nice browns and brookies on several
small, neglected headwaters that remained very fishable right through summer.
Recent floods have rearranged and opened up a lot of habitat; it pays to
explore. My Conehead Mini-Bugger and
my Soft-Hackled Woolly Worm (especially with a pink tungsten bead) produced
most of our bigger fish, but for sheer action, the Fox Squirrel Beadhead has
become a workhorse nymph in my guiding and personal fishing. The strike rate to
this fly is often amazing. I like size 12 for general prospecting, but I get
plenty of hookups by drifting the size 16 through riffles on 5X tippet using no
additional weight. The most active fish in a run often station in riffles,
often in surprisingly skinny water, and the size 16 Fox Squirrel Beadhead drops
just fast enough to drift perfectly thru most spring creek riffles.
Over the course of the
season, we fish my Cow Elk Caddis more than any other dry. The grizzly version
is an excellent match for spring Grannom caddis hatches, while brown is a good
match for crane flies that trickle off regularly on sunny days, especially in
spring and early summer (I see more crane fly hatches than caddis or mayfly
hatches). Also, this buggy, high-quality caddis is a tough dry to beat for
general prospecting.
My unique Split-Fishing
guiding option is proving to be very popular. It’s a truly affordable way for
anglers to see and learn the many strategies and presentations that are perfectly
suited to our small spring creeks. Every year I have local anglers and anglers
from distant states book several consecutive days of split-fishing; it’s a
great way to fish and learn about the Driftless Area. See my web site for details on this attractive guiding option.
In July/August Dale and I
made two backpack trips in the Wind River Range, Wyoming. Our first hike
produced bruiser brook trout from a lake at 11,200 feet, all taken on my
variation of a Mickey Finn bucktail (this fly is not listed in my fly catalog,
but is available on request). On our second hike we toted our backpacks 60
miles and caught some large golden trout, but the action was spotty. The
backpacking left too little time for fishing rivers, but we did have some
memorable hopper fishing for big rainbows on an out-of-the-way Wyoming river
(I’ll be back!) We also hit the black caddis hatch on the Bighorn River at Fort
Smith. For the fourth consecutive year my Beadhead Pheasant Tail Midge in black
was the hot fly during this caddis hatch, even for rising fish. The PT Midge
also takes fish like clockwok when Bighorn midges are popping. In the last four
years we’ve waded the Bighorn in early August, shortly after flows drop from
early summer levels of 10,000 cfs to 4,000 cfs or lower, and we’re learning a
lot about fishing this period.
Fall grouse hunting was good, and we hit more than our share of
woodcock flights. Libby, my five-year-old cocker spaniel is a wily veteran on
running, skulking pheasants. We have such fun putting the heat on roosters that
I passed on hunting deer in northern Minnesota for the first time since 1997,
and then deer-hunted Wisconsin for only two days, so that we could put in a
full season on pheasants.
December was cold and snowy,
but the tail end of 2010 ushered in a brief thaw. I closed out the pheasant
season along a snowy Vernon County spring creek, watching brown trout rise in
balmy 45-degree weather. With that image stuck in my head, spring fishing can’t
arrive too soon.
