The Truckee River ran dirty for a few days after a couple thunderstorms last week laid down significant amounts of rain in very short periods. This caused some mudslides in certain areas, reshaped a few runs from newly laid sediment, and downed a few new trees into the river. As you can imagine, this has also caused some turbidity in the river, especially as it reaches Nevada. In general, we certainly don’t mind a bit of color in the water. In fact, it can often make the fishing far better.

These events will often flush a bunch of food downstream and trigger the fish to feed with reckless abandon. It also makes hiding your tippet easier and also means you can use heavier tippet than normal.

When fishing this week, the red San Juan or squirmy worm remained king, but we also did very well on Pat’s rubberlegs and crawdad patterns such as the dead drift cray or mud bug. Smaller attractor nymphs such as strawberries and cream, duracells and blowtorches were working well when paired with these larger offerings.

As the water temps continue to drop, we are seeing the first signs of fish beginning to spread out from their summer fast-water lies and the indicator rod may become a more effective tool than the euro in the coming weeks. Indicator fishing will allow you to fish more water types, further away from yourself and cover greater amounts of a larger run, during a time where fish may be anywhere.

Even though water temps are dropping and will continue to do so as we see cooler weather ahead, we did still see sections upstream of Boca as well as the Nevada side of the river hit 68 degrees by midday. Please still focus on fishing mornings right now until we see these temps drop further, this sort of self-restraint is incredibly important to keep our wild trout fisheries viable for years to come.