Michael Wright: The other exciting part of March

<p><p>Basketball isn’t the only reason March is exciting.</p></p><p><p>The month also provides some of the year’s first consistent dry fly fishing.</p></p><p><p>Sure, there have been midge hatches all winter. Blue-winged olive mayflies have been out. But searching for rising fish in January and February is about as easy as picking the winner of a game between No. 8 and 9 seeds on the first day of the NCAA Tournament.</p></p><p><p>As the weather warms, the odds of finding trout nosing through the surface of your favorite river go up. Those same midge and blue-wing hatches become more consistent. And, after a good run of warm weather on a freestone stream, the real hero of early spring shows up.</p></p><p><p>The skwala stonefly.</p></p><p><p>Skwalas are inchlong bugs with an olive body and a long wing down their backs. The nymphs live in rocky river bottoms, and when the weather is right, they crawl to the banks and hatch.</p></p><p><p>Female skwalas lay their eggs on the water. It’s there that they inspire the sort of reckless, splashy rises from trout that convince anglers to trade their bobbers for fluffy dry flies.</p></p><p><p>The Yakima River near Ellensburg boasts one of the best skwala emergences around. It’s been good this year, said Skyler Lancaster, a guide at Red’s Fly Shop in the Yakima River Canyon.</p></p><p><p>“It’s been going pretty strong for about 2½ weeks now,” Lancaster said.</p></p><p><p>He added that the fishing has been good from midday on, and that people are finding more fish willing to eat on the surface in the evenings as the days get longer.</p></p><p><p>Skwala hatches aren’t quite as strong on the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River or the St. Joe River, but they’re an option, said Bo Brand, the guide manager at Silver Bow Fly Shop in Spokane.</p></p><p><p>Brand said that while it’s not usually a “banner hatch” on the North Fork Coeur d’Alene River, for example, the big green bugs will move some fish.</p></p><p><p>“You’ll see a couple bugs around, but the fish will still take the dries,” Brand said.</p></p><p><p>He added that neumoras – a slightly smaller stonefly that hatches at about the same time – are also an option on those two rivers. March browns, a large mayfly species, also arrive around the same time. Gray drakes are another big mayfly that appears in the spring.</p></p><p><p>“I’ve seen five different hatches all at once in the spring,” Brand said.</p></p><p><p>Fishing freestone rivers this time of year always comes with a big question: When will runoff turn the river into chocolate milk?</p></p><p><p>Weather forecasts and stream gauges can help answer that question, so it’s not as unpredictable as Oakland beating Kentucky (seriously, who had that?) But even the most experienced anglers guess wrong from time to time. Sometimes, a spike in a stream gauge reading means a river is blown out. Other times, it doesn’t.</p></p><p><p>There isn’t much snow in the mountains this year. Snowpack data on Thursday showed that the Coeur d’Alene drainage had 76% of its median snowpack. The St. Joe was worse off, at 66%.</p></p><p><p>If that snow melts quickly, rivers will run low and hot early this summer. Brand has already heard of some people moving their trips up in the year, predicting that low water could scuttle the best-laid plans of July or August.</p></p><p><p>The only solution is to get the fishing in while you can. The waning days of March could end up being the best days of the year.</p></p><p><p>Remember to pack your skwalas.</p></p>