March Brown Leap
We have an extra day this year because someone somewhen decided to make the Western European system of keeping dates a hot mess. I spent the gift of leap day at the fly shop tying flies and attending to the curious masses trickling in—trout people, groggy from hibernation, looking for river updates, wondering if any fish are on the move because we had three days of warmth and sunshine and maybe, just maybe we’ll get a spring that isn’t all swollen rivers and snow melt. I can’t read clouds and weather as tea leaves though I suspect I’d be just as accurate as the local news station kid so I told the truth: there are fish, I’ve caught them, mostly a nymph game, but I did see some March Browns on the second of the warm days in between the showers and clouds. My claim of March Browns was validated by my tying. A pile of three variations sat on the tying mat on the counter. What guide and trout bum would waste their time tying patterns they haven’t seen yet? Seems the law of demand and supply applies to fly fishing, too.
March Browns—the first serious and big mayfly of Oregon spring—should be out on the water soon, in respectable numbers. A finicky bug, the hatch is spotty and unpredictable if your idea of predicability means setting a calendar reminder or looking at your watch like all those Colorado and Montana anglers and knowing things are popping. If, however, you are more inclined to pay attention to environmental factors, March Browns are not that hard to understand. They hatch (usually) between rain showers when the spring sky breaks open and the humidity rises even as a light wind promises a return to cool and cloud cover. They show up just around the time red buds appear on the maples in my front yard and when my wife’s daffodils start showing out.
The hatch doesn’t come off on the whole river all at once. Rather, it happens in sections. Starting low, we chase it up the watershed, following warmer water and looking for those flat stretches where the substrate can shelter enough invertebrate life to allow for a rise. The Willamette hatch happens before the McKenzie, and that was where I saw my first bugs of the season in late, late February. But, that first hatch is only on the main stem, usually between the confluence with the McKenzie and, say, Pengra Boat launch. The Willamette Forks (Coast, North, and Middle) come later. In fact, the McKenzie below Leaburg Dam has its hatch before either the North Fork of the Middle Fork or the Middle Fork of the Willamette near Oakridge. The upper McKenzie hatch delivers around the same time as both the Middle Fork and North Fork Willamette. Same general guidelines apply to the South Fork McKenzie, but that depends on the flushing of Cougar Reservoir and whether or not there has been a late winter/early spring snow. Yet, even when it does happen, the hatch doesn’t happen for long. The bugs come off for twenty minutes to forty-five minutes, conditions change, and the river goes cold. I’ve found myself beating the water to a froth on more than one occasion, desperate for the right fly, only to realize I am shit out of luck.
So, while we can talk about the general time line and order of things, the fact remains getting into real March Brown mayhem is as much about luck as it is knowing where to be when the time is right.
More than anything else, March is a time when trout anglers knock the rust off from overwintering. For my part, this is when I move on from winter steelhead. I don’t abandon them, but I go from big spey rods and big, flashy flies to lighter tackle and more crowded fly boxes. Don’t get me wrong, steelhead are cool but I’ve always known myself to be more of a trout bum the steelheader and the March Brown hatch has all the contrary, contradictory, frustrating, and confounding elements to it that remind me of that preference. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of trout that will show themselves in a feeding frenzy. Sometimes I just laugh at the number of fish even as I know I have fished over those same waters countless times and never gotten a bump. But hey, that’s fishing.
There are not many anglers who chase the whole hatch for obvious reasons. These early mayflies are something most serious trout people know about and they know it enough to stay prepared for its happening without targeting river sections, forecasts, and water temps. Most legends of March Brown triumphs start with, “I wasn’t expecting it to happen but had a feeling it might. I was just smart enough to be prepared. Right place, right time, dumb luck.”
I like my hatches this way. They offer challenging problem sets from both a tying and fishing angle. Spotty yet consistent means spinning up patterns based on probability, intuition, and gut instinct. Spotty hatches require baking a dash of chaos into the recipe. More than anything, they keep a certain genre of angler at bay. We all know the type: those river-clogging dabblers who expect their fishing conditions to fall within the same plus-or-minus five percent margin of error as their quarterly reports. The people that expect to bend the whole living world to their will. The people who have lost contact with the truth of the human animal being just as subject to the natural world—indeed being a thing of nature ourselves—because the bulk of their existence has been shaped, formed, defined and limited by artificial light, artificial life, and artificial intelligence. I’m no gate keeper but I sure do appreciate it when mother nature does it for me.
Putting aside the taciturn and getting back to what matters, I must confess March Browns have humbled me over the years. My first encounter with the hatch in Oregon saw me standing knee-deep on the Middle Fork Willamette, trout boiling all around me, and not a damn one interested in my #12 soft hackle (the only size and pattern I had in the box). The trout were keyed on dries—the cripples it seemed—and weren’t remotely interested in my menu offerings. I haven’t felt that rejected since the great Homecoming rejection of 1997.
Three seasons ago, I didn’t come across a single hatch. Hindsight tells me this was an act of cosmic justice. That was the year I tied over three-dozen March Brown variants including soft hackles, emergers, cripples, dries, and even parachute dries. Believing my own industrial revolution cursed me, I gave every one of those flies away to various friends, clients, enemies, and fly exchanges. The way I figured it, starting from zero the next year would serve as adequate penance for my Promethean offense.
Last year, in the middle of a hatch on the McKenzie, I couldn’t get a single trout interested. Out of desperation, I switched to a trout spey setup with an attractor streamer pattern tied on. Twenty minutes later, I had hooked and lost two steelhead. The first hit like lightning and ran with the current. My chances at that fish were the same as my chances at stopping or turning a freight train. I kept the second fish—pinned ten minutes later—on long enough to see it leap free of the water upstream. Its profile was bright chrome, framed against the dull, leafless far bank in the afternoon light. It splashed down with such a belly in the line that its next roll saw it come free never to be touched again.
I have my hopes for this year. They are measured against, sedated by the wisdom of past seasons. Three weeks ago I felt that old sense start to prickle at the back of my neck. Last week, winter roared back. Cold fronts. Snow. A deluge that stalled seasonal change and swelled rivers to near flood stage.
I’ve tied up some spinners—an old pattern taken the old school route with rabbit’s foot for the wings instead of synthetic fibers. I have my cripples ready—sizes 14-10—in various shade of brown and tan with both elk hair wings and rabbit’s foot wings. Of course there are the soft hackles. Old standbys tied with either a wire rib or this year’s grand experiment: a holographic tinsel rib because I think it looks enticing even though I don’t know a damn thing about what trout find enticing.
Everyone I know whose instincts I trust has started to stir. We’re all saying the same things, asking the same questions, trusting and doubting the same alchemy.
Even with hope and preparation, I have no idea what’s coming. Uncertainty keep me interested. In a world of so much determinism, fishing can and should be one of the last castles for mystery. It’s the not knowing that matters most. It’s the grab from beneath, the tug out of the unseen out of quiet and peace and moving water that renews the season, renews faith in wonder.
All I can do is prepare myself as best as I can for what I don’t know. That’s it. Nothing more. And, if that ain’t fishing, I don’t want it anyhow.
