Cause For A Smile

The rain and overcast continues along with cooler temps and more wet stuff is likely for today. The rivers have stayed in surprisingly good shape through all the rain and the dry fly action has been consistent. There has been good hatches of the small olive bodied mayflies that we as fly anglers refer to as Blue Wing Olives, BWO’s or Baetis. If you are new to fly fishing this can be a confusing set of terms. The reference to any of these three words tells you that small mayflies are hatching. It is usually not a reference to one mayfly in particular, but it can be. Now isn’t that confusing. The color of the bodies on these mayflies ranges the full spectrum from brown olive to gray olive with every color in between. These mayflies tend to show up during rainy, sprinkly, spritzy, overcast days. The reason we generalize about this group of mayflies is that 99.9% of folks cannot identify exact species without the help of sophisticated tools or keys. What I want you to take away from this is that Blue Wings(really a light gray or what we call dun colored wing)do not have blue wings(more confusion). This loose group of mayflies, composed of many different species, in many different sizes, is a general term used to describe insects with a wide range of olive colored bodies. There size is small as hooks go, so you will want to choose fly patterns from 18-24 to cover matching this hatch. A new color BWO shows up every year while I am fishing and I try to match it when I get home or back to the fly shop. I likely will never see this particular species of BWO ever again in my life, but I will have a match for him if he ever hatches again while I am fishing. I store these flies together in one small box because the are an important food source for the trout. If you don’t like to fish in the rain or on cool overcast days you will probably not need too many of these patterns in you fly boxes. Anyhow the waters are fine for now, go fish! And don’t forget your Baetis patterns.