Too Hot to Fish

I decided that it is just too darn hot to fish, the Trico hatch and spinner fall would last about 20 min's at best and that is just not enough time to zero in on a good fish, then plopping beetles while you sweat- no thanks!
This coming weekend looks to be more of the same, 90+ degrees daytime temps and 75+ at night, might be a good time to swim some mice in a few of the larger pools in Spring Creek or Bald Eagle but I'm really not into that crap. Yes you can catch some fish and a lot at that with beetles and ants but with the tress of playing them you run the rish of killing them after you release them. Was at Spring Creek park on Sunday the 24th and saw a wonderful 15" brown dead on the path, no idea how it got there but what a loss, it made it that long in that area before it died? We took a lab into the water for him to cool the water felt cool but factor in the stress of playing them and you'll have certin death as a result.
  As I said last week I'll go over an experiment we did 35 years ago, Sherwin Albert and myself took the time to collect a bunch of stoneflies both yellow Perla's and big black Tarnus (sp) we took each one and released them in the water and watched what they did and any other actions that might help us tie flies. Here are the results, Perla's moved their legs ( a crawling motion) in an attempt to try and swim but floated and desended in the water until they bounced off the bottom a few times befoer they got their footing and dissepeared under a rock. The big black (very dark brown) Tarnus (sp) did nothing but float in a fetal position till they hit the bottom once and with their very powerful legs and claws grabbed hold and moved under the rocks- Results all your Perla (yellow stoneflies) need to be on straight hooks with legs that move in the currents, hen hackle works the best as does the aspect of the fly in the round, trout see all side of this, the different colors that are seen are triggers for this are very important, The larger very dark guys are quite different, a curved hook with legs that do not move seem to be keys for this guy, a stiffer fly will not hurt your results only be very sharp on the hook sets because the rejection time is fast on these guys, this fly also needs to be fished in some very heavy riffles.
  I also said that I'll talk about Charlie Meek and I using blue flies, well here goes. Charlie worked for PSU and would visit my store from time to time and we would review ideas that we had and compare results. We both read somewhere that the color blue was visible deeper into the water column, we talked about it by darm we both came up with different ideas to try. I tied some sparkle winged spinners from size 14 thru 20, both light and dark, took them to the Hepner Hole and waited for the next sulphur spinner fall, well a few took but not anything that we thought would happen, I tried them the entire summer even tying some 24's for Trico's- no big deal. The next time Chalie came in, he had the same results, well maybe we need to go under the surface, OK let's tie some nymphs! I tied some of my Perla stonefly nymphs in blue using the pattern that has been very successful but using blue rabbit fur for the bodies- gave them a bath and not much worked- took it off and put on a standard Perla and got into fsh. I guess Charlie had better luck because the next time we fished together on Elk Creek he had the Patriot as a dry dropped rig and it worked- go figure.