Follow the bugs to a good day of fishing for trout

By Chester Allen | The Olympian • Published August 16, 2007

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — The noon sun blasted down and through the gin-clear water of the small meadow stream.

Long strands of water weeds twisted like big, green snakes in the gentle current, and you could see every pebble and rock on the bottom.

Not one trout was in sight.

But they were there — hiding under the weeds or under the undercut banks.

I tied on a grasshopper fly that sported wiggly rubber legs and got on my hands and knees. A short crawl got me to the bank, where I carefully cast that hopper along the undercut bank.

The hopper landed with a meaty splash, and a trout shot out of its underwater cave and walloped the fly.

The brown trout dug hard to get back under the bank, and I could feel the leader grating on the grass roots dangling in the underwater cave. The leader held, and I quickly released the fish, which was about 12 inches long.

I spent the rest of Wednesday roaming the meadow sections of this small stream, and trout came eagerly to my grasshopper, ant and beetle flies -- even in the middle of the 90-degree day.

Some of the fish were big — even by Yellowstone's gaudy standards. I lost the biggest fish, which jibes with my own mediocre skills.

I'm no fishing genius, but I do know that August trout — in Yellowstone rivers, in Oregon rivers and in South Sound's Deschutes and Nisqually rivers — look for the land bugs of summer all day long. The Yakima River near Ellensburg is famous for summer hopper and beetle fishing.

Most of the summer hatches of mayflies, caddisflies and stoneflies are over or tapering off, but the trout are eager to pack on weight for the winter that is coming up fast. That means trout — and some of the biggest trout in the stream — are looking up at the surface all day long.

The trout get especially silly for ants, beetles and hoppers during the sun-blasted middle of the day. That's when the bugs are most active — and likely to blunder into the water — and when most anglers are taking a break.

Better anglers than me have written articles and entire books about fishing for picky trout, and most of them say that late summer is the time to tie on a hopper, beetle or ant. I learned this when I was still in grade school and used my mother's fingernail superglue to attach hooks to live grasshoppers on a California trout stream.

I got in a little bit of trouble, but the catching was worth the chewing.

Decades later, I still like to sit around on the banks of trout streams, and it's easy to see that millions of bugs scamper around in the middle of the day.

Bugs even fall onto our lakes during the summer, and I've caught bass, panfish and the odd trout that were feeding on the beetles or ants.

But most of my buggy fishing happens on streams.

I once sat under an alder tree on South Sound's own Deschutes River to eat a noon sandwich. I noticed ants and beetles were falling off the tree branches and speckling my bread.

I forgot about the buggy bread when I looked at the water and saw a pod of five nice cutthroat trout eagerly chomping the bugs that fell to the water.

I only landed one of the fish — the water was clear and I spooked the others with a bungled cast — but that trout was a fat 16 inches long. That is a trophy fish on the Deschutes, and a nice fish on ANY western trout stream.

These hot days of late summer are a perfect time for a beginner to try casting a fly rod. The fish expect the fly to land with a big splash, and you don't have to cast far.

You do have to spend a lot of time on your knees — or quietly wading under trees that overhang the water.

The bug-addled trout of August are there — even if you can't see them.

Chester Allen's fishing column appears Fridays in The Olympian. He can be reached at 360-754-4226 or callen@theolympian.com.