Credit River~Looking For Isonychia!
After seeing lots of evidence of these last weekend, I set out to looking for them yesterday afternoon…
Well, there were lots of active nymphs 
around, but very few adults. I was planning to fish dries if conditions were right, but it wasn’t meant to be. Being "swimmers", the isonychia share their habitat with, among other things, stone flies. In an effort to cover all the bases, I tried a few generic, dark-colored nymphs that could, to trout in fast water, be interpreted as either natural nymph. Wasn’t working that well. So, that ruled out the Iso nymphs. Time to go with bigger, heavier stone fly patterns . Thats when things started to pick up. After catching a few fish, I decided to take a closer look at the natural nymphs. I attached the macro lens to my digital, set it on a rock that had a shallow puddle on it and caught a few samples. I noticed that after a minute or so the big nymphs started doing push-ups. My guess is that this little dance had less to do with enjoying the spotlight, and more to do with what was probably a lack of oxygen in that small pool of water. I’d be curious to know if there is any other reason they do this though. It was fascinating. This mpeg shows the big stone in motion….
The water was a bit low, but cool. There were a few Iso’s, a few BWOs and some tricos in the air~small black caddis crawling around on my waders. The trout caught on dries fell for size#14,#12 and #10 elk hair caddis skittered on both upstream, and "down and accross" presentations.
I’d like to thank George Moffat, a professional photographer that happened to be handy near where I was fishing, for taking a few photos for me. I had just put my digital in the back of my vest, wondering if having it handy was jinxing me. (was still trying to prove out the Iso/stone thing) I called him over to retrieve my camera when he informed me that the giant SLR-looking unit he had WAS a digital. The photos looked great. Thanks Goerge, nice meeting you!
