Flashes of silver glistened off the oars as my guide dipped them into the waters of the Green River below Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah. My guide’s name was Rusty, no doubt a nickname given for the man’s auburn beard, mustache and hair. He was a giant of a man, fully capable of pulling oars and directing his drift boat and me through the 7-mile canyon that exists below the massive dam on the Green River.
If you have never fished the Green from a rowboat or by walking into the canyon on the trail on the north side of the river from the dam to Little Hole, you should put this river on your bucket list. It is a river that encompasses every element that appeals to a fly fisherman. There are lots of hatches throughout the year on this river, but it is the multitude of long, deep runs, powerful riffles and eddies that creates an amazing amount of trout habitat. Because the water is enriched by the huge lake trapped behind Flaming Gorge Dam, the river also has ample amounts of trout that easily hit the magic 20-inch-range, so anglers can indulge their big trout fantasies.
I was on the water with my good friend Lenny who owns a well-known gun shop in Aurora, Colo. We were on the Green to fish the famous cicada ‘hatch’ in mid-June. It’s a time when the really large trout would lose all caution and rise to the surface to gulp the multitudinous cicadas, a large insect that rivals grasshoppers or stoneflies for size and protein content. We were also fishing the Green because all of the rivers in the Cody/Yellowstone region were still high and off color from spring runoff- a good time and reason, to fish other rivers.
Rusty had regaled the two of us with tales from previous cicada hatch years. The numbers of trout put in the net during the month of June were eye popping in totals and, of course, these tales were told to get Lenny and I completely stoked by the time our boat launched for the day’s float. It worked.
As luck would have it, we were one of the first boats to launch, so we were not floating behind or in the midst of the usual flotilla of guided and privately floated boats that hits the Green during June. Also fortunate was the fact that we didn’t have to dredge the Green with small nymphs until the trout ‘woke’ up. We began the day with a size 4 cicada imitation constructed entirely of black foam stretched over a peacock quill body, with some rubber legs tied in on each side to give the foam some wiggle and life, an enticing trigger for the trout lined up to gobble these imitations down as we cast and floated.
Lenny was up front and I sat behind Rusty the first three and a half miles, and then I switched places and went to the front for the remaining section of the float. Lenny’s first cast was placed near the shore where there was deep, slow water behind some boulders. He mended his line to set up the drift and the mend caused his foam cicada to twitch just the slightest bit. Not a nano-second later, his fly was gone and my buddy’s rod was bent into a nice arc as he leaned into the fish and drove the barbless hook deep into the jaw of a fat rainbow trout. As he fought his fish to the boat, my cast was also devoured. My fish was a nice chunky brown trout about the same length of Len’s rainbow, or 18 inches of muscle at the end of both our leaders. Not a bad start to the day, if one can commit the sin of bragging at this point.
After landing the trout double, we high-fived each other and Rusty with gusto. It is always good to get the skunk out of the boat, so the anglers and the guide can then settle down and get into a groove. That groove is to cast, set the hook, haul the trout to the net for release, then get the fly back into the water to repeat the process all over again. Lenny and I did just that for the rest of the day. By the time we broke for lunch on a nice sandy beach about midway into the Green’s canyon, both of us had released enough trout to say, “If we never catch another trout, we have had an awesome day.”
Here’s a word of advice. Never, ever say something like that halfway through a fishing trip. After lunch, it seemed we had jinxed ourselves by proclaiming our satisfaction with the numbers netted and the fact we were such mighty anglers the first half of the day. We must have floated a mile with lots of trout looking at our foam flies, but few were willing to bash them and gobble with the unabashed vigor and delight seen in the morning. Even Rusty, one of the more illustrious guides on the Green, was bamboozled.
We tried all kinds of cicada imitations with no luck. If it weren’t for the fact other boats with anglers weren’t experiencing the same attitude from the trout, the two of us would have been completely and thoroughly demoralized. Again, as luck would have it, I had brought along some Shoshone River fly boxes that had some unweighted halfback nymphs in one of them. These are buggy-looking flies that our trout closer to Cody and the Absaroka Mountains love. In desperation, I knotted on a size 6 halfback to my 3X leader and tossed it out near the bank. The next thing I knew, the fly was slammed by a really big brown trout.
Thinking this was just a fluke, I cast the fly again after the brown was brought to the boat and released. Bam. Another trout was on my line. Woo hoo is right. Lenny, one of the most competitive of my angling friends was having no more of that, so he commandeered my fly box and tied the same size halfback onto his leader. First cast and, B-I-N-G-O, he was hooked up. Needless to say, the halfbacks saved the day. Before the afternoon was over, the two of us had gone through two dozen halfbacks and all that I had lined up in my fly box.
What a day. We caught trout under other boats drifting by, we caught trout in the riffles, we caught trout off the shore, we caught trout everywhere we pitched a halfback. We put on a show as other watched in awe as trout after trout bent our fly rods. When asked what we were using, we lied of course and said, “A Joe’s Hopper.” We did that to eliminate competition, naturally, and by the time Rusty’s boat hit the takeout at Little Hole, Rusty was more of a legend than he was already.
The three of us did a mental count and agreed that each of us had caught and released over 100 trout apiece from the Green River. Talk about some sore arms from hauling in fish, but neither of us were complaining after that humbling mile or so with no fish to hoot and holler about when we hooked another trout. Naturally, Rusty asked if he could have the two halfbacks we still had tied on the ends of our leaders. He wanted to have some of these amazing flies for future trips so that he would be Top Gun in his boat and so he could ace the cicada hatch again should his favorite foam fly fall out of favor with the trout.
We gladly accommodated him as a reward for his magnificent efforts while rowing us down the Green. In future trips to the Green since then, the non-weighted halfback has performed well, but never again as well as it did the day Lenny and I first introduced that fly to the trout swimming the fabulous Green River below Flaming Gorge Dam.
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