silver creek, part 2

After walking through a tunnel of trees on a foot trail I reached the creek. Many sections of the path had planks put in place to step on. The creek was smooth, glassy surfaced and very clear. It looked like photographs I have seen of  famous English Chalk streams, but I wasn't in Hampshire or Berkshire, I was in Blaine county, Idaho. The next thing I noticed was the prolific, dense weed growth. Much of the aquatic vegetation reached the surface. Between this growth were a myriad of channels; sort of mini streams with their own individual flow rates. It seemed like several rivers within one river. Some of the weed growth was so dense it created mat like islands. There were also natural islands with side channels and the creek meandered significantly as most spring creeks do. Basically there was holding water (habitat) for trout everywhere; and there were trout everywhere.
Most of the trout that I saw rising were smallish. That was the case most of the week. I was between hatches. The September Olives had not started. There was a brief Trico hatch in the morning, one hour or so, which was a leftover hatch from the summer as early September, when I was there, was hot and sunny. Day time temperatures were in the low 80's F. There were some PMD's mixed in with the Tricos in the morning and then a very light evening presence. Overall the best hatch was the Tricos. I fished Trico patterns, hook size 22. The PMD's were also tiny, about the same size. I started spotting some larger fish later in the week when I grew a bit more accustomed to the creek. They were bank fish but due to the relatively brief and sparse hatches often only surfaced occasionally. This made it tough but I managed to hook a couple. My best fish and chances occurred when the morning Trico hatch was at its best and I was able to find trout that were feeding/rising with a rhythm. I experienced two mornings like this when the hatch was better and hooked, but didn't land, a sizable fish that was displacing a lot of water when surfacing. I caught fish every day and was pleased with this. In comparison to other creeks I've fished I found Silver Creek trout very subtle in their rises. Sometimes I thought they were subsurface feeding but when I took the time to really watch I realized  they were often picking off duns from the surface: very subtle sips with no head appearing. Maybe a lot of these fish were brown trout as I caught several through the week. A good portion, probably close to 50 percent, of the fish that I landed were browns.
I saw many large Browns when wading. They were usually along deep banks, undercut areas, and always right on the bottom. I saw some spawning browns in shallow gravel areas, again large fish. Silver creek is a great place to study trout behavior due to the wonderful water clarity.
I caught a few nice fish on a beetle pattern. Had little success with hoppers possibly due to it not being windy; it was very still when I was there. I was pleased to just catch fish and would like to return when there is a more significant hatch and some occasional cloud cover to hopefully see some of the creeks larger denizens surface feed with regularity. As always on angling trips I learned some things and will describe this in my next post.

Silver Creek Brown Trout