First caney fork trip

[MattC]

went with my cousin to the caney fork for my first time on saturday. new to fly fishing. Started at the dam, very few people there, and after about an hour or 2 caught a Brook Trout on a size 16 hares ear nymph. i looked away then looked back and couldnt find my indicator so i set the hook and sure enough FISH ON. Yep, my first fish out of the caney was a brook trout. generation came after that and we went to another place and didnt catch anything. then a storm came and we had to cut the trip short. Very fun first trip though.

[Travis C.]

Congrats man..

I remember my first Caney trout. I was admiring it while holding my net between my legs and when I finally let it go the fish wasn't the only thing gone.

Next trip take you some black zebra midges in size 18 and try those. That is usually what they are feeding pretty big on (black fly larva) this time of year. Sometimes a size or two smaller or size bigger will get but 18 is a good all around size.

[bd-]

Awesome, Matt! The brook trout may not get as big but they are fun and I'm glad to have them in the river. I caught one yesterday morning that had some amazing colors - gray, black, purple, pink, and orange hues. They are beautiful fish.

I agree with Travis about the zebra midges - I have to say I think #20 is a better size than #18 though. Some days they want them even smaller than that, but #20 will get you there most days. It's hard getting used to fishing a fly that small, but if you look at the natural bugs in the river, the trout are eating some pretty tiny stuff most of the time.

Fish some sowbugs too. Commercially available sowbug patterns that look "right" are tough to find, so eventually you might find yourself tying your own. But they are a must-have fly on the Caney. On those days when the fish are obviously eating but you've been through everything in your box and can't find anything they'll hit, there's a good chance that they're eating sowbugs.

bd

[MattC]

thanks for the info. I was actually using a size 20 zebra midge first but got impatient, and switched. i'll know better next time. alson found a ton of stoneflies under rocks that look very similar to pheasant tails. cant wait til next time

[bd-]

Are you sure they were stoneflies? They might have been mayflies. There have been increasing numbers of blue wing olives in the upper river for the last few years.

bd

[MattC]

Im not sure it was my cousin that told me. He told me they were stoneflies so i beleieved him. I just looked at a few pictures and they seem to look more like stoneflies. is that unusual?

[bd-]

There are a wide variety of mayfly and stonefly nymphs that can look pretty similar.

Most (but not all) mayfly nymphs have three "tails." All stonefly nymphs have two tails. So a good rule of thumb is that if it has three tails, it's a mayfly, though this isn't foolproof. To definitively distinguish between mayfly and stonefly larvae, you almost need a magnifier to look at gill placement and the extremely tiny "claws" on the end of the legs, but that's tough to do in the field.

There is a small black stonefly that seems to hatch on the Caney in the winter and very early spring, but I've never seen it upriver from the Kirby Road access.

Mayflies are a little more common upriver, and last October there were a few respectable bluewing olive hatches within a mile or two of the dam, at least as far upriver as Lancaster. The mayflies are still not as thick as midges and blackflies in the upper 5 miles of river, but since the Corps started sluicing in low oxygen times and providing a minimum flow, the water quality improvements have allowed the mayfly population to expand upstream somewhat.

bd