The Fall River is one little river you don’t want to pass up on a nice November day. From streamers to nymphs to dry flies to match the hatch and a lot of sight fishing, it is an exciting place to cast your line now.

Like last week, not much has changed on the fly recommendation list, with Blue Winged Olives #18-20 taking the top spot in my mind as your #1 hatch to match for late morning to mid afternoon. Add some amber colored caddis to the lot and watch for 2 things, fish making a splashy rise, or fish that have refused your BWO’s but continue to rise well to “something”. The 1st “something” I would try is a Silvey’s Edible Emerger. That Brian Silvey is not just a steelhead guru, he is a great trout angler and has some innovative trout flies too. The Edible Emerger, and Primetime Pupa are flies you should add to your collection for the Fall, Deschutes and even the Met and Crooked. And the other “something” is Midges. Most of the midges you’ll see hatch are jet black, but don’t overlook fishing a red midge too. Under the category of I don’t know why, red works….

Ping or Tan MOP, Orange eggs with a tungsten bead, Zebras in red or black, purple perdigons, Napoleon’s, Slum Lords and Soccer Moms and a white or natural Sculpzilla which gets deep and with a lot of movement. I 1st learned to streamer fish on the Fall River in 1988 with my friend Matt Klee who had learned it on an Alaska trip. I remember being in a big slow pool, watching Matt expertly cast a natural Zonker (silver body with natural rabbit strip wing) across to the logs on the other bank. He’d strip that Zonker through the pool and the swimming motion of the fly caught his best friends attention (that would be me) and the trouts attention. Time and time again, the fish could not resist the streamer. He shared a Zonker with me that day and I became a streamer devotee.
As a side note to the being a streamer guy, in 1992 I got to go to Argentina for the 1st time, and I remember reading (before internet for me) everything I could find on fly fishing patagonia. If any of you remember a fly shop in Jackson, WY called West Bank Anglers they had recently been there and talked about a Pancora Crab present in the rivers of South America. What’s that? I stubby Crayfish native to those waters in Patagonia. I remember them writing about using ‘lectric buggers, which was a black wooly bugger with blue flashabou mixed in the black marabou tail and then pulled down each side of the black chenille body, ribbed over with the black hackle and copper wire. The fly was electric looking and I used them with good success in Argentina and here on the lakes at home. But even then, I loved to dream of the possibilities of other flies I might try from the stories and articles I liked to read and decided that if the ‘lectric bugger was good, how about a wooly bugger with a blue estaz chenille body? To tell the complete story, I didn’t use it much in Argentina but later that spring Matt came over from Portland to fish the weekend with me and we went to BBR to play tennis and fish the lake, and I caught fish after fish on my blue wooly bugger and returned the Zonker fly favor by sharing one of my flies with Matt. I still carry that blue bugger and probably need to fish it more.