As we alluded to in the opener, this has been an incredible week on the river. We are so happy to see the fish populations in the Truckee looking as healthy as ever, with some truly epic fish caught, including an incredible brown caught by 11-year-old Adam Lapointe, while on a guided trip through the shop this Wednesday. While it would be easy to see this storm passing through as a negative, we see it as a great reset on the pre-runoff conditions that we saw this week. The river will run clear once again and while it will likely slow the fishing down this week as the cold weather causes both the flows and the temps to drop, this will be short lived. As soon as it gets warm again, expect a repeat of what we saw this week. We much prefer to see a colder than average spring to keep the snow on the hills instead of in the river, this makes for better fishing not only in the spring, but later in the year as well!

The Skwala Stoneflies made a solid appearance this week, with more of these early season stones on the river than we seen in recent years. The fish are being duped on the nymphs with regularity and chances of sticking a few large fish on top is a reality. This week TCO guide and ambassador, Finn Loper found a dandy of a brown on a Skwala adult, and he is not alone with multiple reports of big fish showing up on top, which is considered uncommon on our river. We are well stocked on both the nymphs and adults for these bugs, so stop by to match the hatch.

As we began to see the river come up during last weeks warmer days, it also began to take on a bit of color, when this happens it usually signifies the time to switch from your smaller Baetis and midges to larger attractor nymphs such as worms, eggs, crawdads, and you guessed it, Skwalas.

The fish here on the California side are still not sitting in any faster moving water, so as the flows come up it is important to continue to find the right type of water to find the fish. Odds are, after this next storm and once the air temps rise again, we may begin to find some of the rainbows start to move into riffles, but that could still be a couple of weeks out depending on how the forecast looks. 2024 is shaping up to be an epic year on the T, we hope you all can find some time to get on the water this spring and summer.