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Truckee a tough river to fish
The Truckee River can be a very humbling river to fish. I moved to Truckee in 1978 and tried to learn to fly fish by teaching myself.
Neither that method or the river were particularly good choices for a beginner. I never did master the river as a fly angler, although I was able to do well fishing with crawdad imitating plugs.
I moved to the west side of the Sierra in 1981 and I have continued to fish the Truckee and keep in contact with locals who fish it regularly. Part of the reason that the Truckee can be so difficult is the water temperature cycle through the season.
Starting opening day in April, the flows are fishable, but the water temperatures are too cold for good fishing. As the season warms and the snows melt, the river runs high and cold.
Two flies are much better than one
Anglers use two flies to effectively reduce the time in finding out what insect and what stage of it that the trout are feeding upon. The nymphal or larval stage of an insect is typically the stage that fish feed on the majority of time.
As a result, many anglers fish a large dry fly as an indicator. This fly takes the place of the yarn or hard bubble type of indicators. From this fly a nymph is suspended with a length of leader material. Some anglers even will add a split shot to get the second fly deeper. Doing this requires a very large and highly buoyant dry fly. Too much weight will obviously sink the indicator fly.
Anglers attach the second fly by tying the leader of the second fly off of a tag end of a line splice, this is called a dropper, or by directly tying to the bend of the hook on the indicator fly.
Fishing the pits
A few are little more than summer mud holes. Others resemble farm ponds. Some swallow 100 or more acres. Many are stunningly deep, clear and, in a few spots, surprisingly cold. Nearly all are fishable. "A couple of the lakes have trout in them," said Rob Rold, assistant fisheries biologist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife's southeastern district. "They're deep enough and cold enough to support them." My fishing partner John Durbin and I weren't looking for trout. And even if we had it would practically have taken downriggers to reach them, and we were armed with a couple of handcrafted bamboo fly rods from Durbin's workshop -- tools not really designed for deep-water probing. If the fish weren't near the top of the water column, they would remain safe from us.
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