happens largely unnoticed to the angler, and is the reason most of us go hours of the early morning fishless and frustrated to no end. This misleading is often brought on by the first few adult caddisfly we see fluttering in the air and directed by the advice we might have been given. Those first few are the lucky ones of the order that made it through the current, past all the unsuspecting trout, and have broken through the surface film long before the trout start looking up. Pay them no attention other than as a useful tool to suggest that a hatch is nearing its commencement.
At this stage of the game, the larvae have broken away from their habitat or cases and are drifting freely with the current. This is when and where one of the first and most damaging misconceptions that are conveyed to an angler out there arises. I was once instructed that a hatching caddisfly swims like a rocket to the surface—hence the implementation of swinging a Deep Sparkle Pupa through riffles—where upon breaching the film they ride along for the briefest of moments as the pupa or subimago prepares to take flight, at which time they only return later in the evening when the adult females’ oviposit on or near the bottom of the river. I think back now to the sheer number of trout I missed and can only shake my head in disgust.
Let me clarify some of the incorrect aspects of this hatch that will hopefully correct this misguidance: 1.) these pupae do swim, but do so in a slow kicking manner with hair covered legs that create gaseous bubbles beneath their skin; 2.) the pupae don’t blast from the depths and crash through the film like a surface to air missile, they drift until the trapped gases lift them to the surface; 3) yes the adults’ presences is important when they return later in the evening or in some cases late into the night, but not at the beginning of the hatch, and not in the manner at which the Elk Hair and Deer Hair caddis patterns are designed; 4.) the emerging insects are much lighter, with almost a translucent light-dun coloring in the wing, and retain the bright-green colored abdomen for quite some time before returning to the river.
Take for example the Mother’s Day Caddis that claim a projected hatch date around the end of April and the first couple weeks of May. This prolific hatch begins when a large number of larvae collectively drift downstream near the bottom during their transitional phase from larva to pupa. This drift usually lasts from 10 to 30 feet before the newly formed pupae rise and become trapped in the surface, and goes largely unnoticed by anglers. However, pump a trout’s stomach during the first part of the day and you’ll wonder how they managed to fit a thousand larvae in their stomach and still live to swim about.
This is, as LaFontaine put it, the first hesitation in a string of three. Anglers would do best to fish this part of the hatch with drag free presentations in a combination of two flies. For my go-to setup I run a size 12, 14, or 16 bright-green beadhead larva pattern like Griffin’s Euro Candy Caddis, Orivs’ Shaggy Wire Caddis, or the beadhead version of the Z-wing Caddis Pupa as my first fly, and a darker slightly more buoyant pattern that represents the fluttering legs and growing wing pads of the pupa for the dropper.
My favorite droppers are UPF’s Ex-Sedge-Rin in sizes 12 and 14, an un-weighted version of the Super Pupa in 14, or LaFontaine’s Deep Sparkle Pupa in sizes 12-16. The heavy beaded larva imitation serves as an anchor near the bottom while the dropper tumbles along suspended and slightly elevated in the water column. Adding a delicate lift to the tip of the rod during the drift will raise the two flies in the water column and breathes a little life into the flies, and is often just enough movement to entice a wary trout to strike. This double rig setup offers the un-rising trout two different feeding options before the pupa reach their second hesitation in the hatch, and has accounted for countless large trout during early mornings.