Latest / The Articulate Fly / S6, Ep 36: Mac Brown's Spring Hatch Hacks and Windy Day Tactics

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S6, Ep 36: Mac Brown's Spring Hatch Hacks and Windy Day Tactics · The Articulate Fly

• 0:03
  Marvin: Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Flower,
• 0:06
  Marvin: back with another Casting Angles with Mack Brown. Mack, how are you?
• 0:11
  Mac: I'm doing great. How are you doing, Marvin?
• 0:13
  Marvin: As always, just trying to stay out of trouble. Was the Easter Bunny good to you?
• 0:18
  Mac: Oh yeah, yeah, the Easter Bunny was good. Nice weather. And we turned back to
• 0:22
  Mac: blackberry winter the last few days here.
• 0:25
  Marvin: Yeah, but you were telling me that the spring hatch activity has been pretty good, right?
• 0:31
  Mac: Oh yeah, yeah. Middle of the day has been really good. And start in the middle
• 0:36
  Mac: of the day and towards the evening has been great with hatches and spinner falls
• 0:41
  Mac: and four or five different things going on pretty much every day.
• 0:46
  Marvin: And so what should folks expect to see kind of in those early spring hatches
• 0:51
  Marvin: in western North Carolina?
• 0:54
  Mac: Well, early in the morning, a lot of the trips you'll see start out there early
• 0:57
  Mac: in the morning. So, I mean, it's going to be more of a nymphing game early.
• 1:01
  Mac: And if they want to do more dry fly, then start midday.
• 1:06
  Mac: Dry fly, wet fly is both really good.
• 1:09
  Mac: Middle of the day. And wet fly can be, like, really good right up until dark.
• 1:14
  Mac: And so the hatches are pretty easy to tell, I mean, just by looking up on the
• 1:19
  Mac: surface. Once you start to see a lot of the risers and sippers everywhere,
• 1:24
  Mac: then you know what's going on.
• 1:26
  Mac: And what we look for always is looking for swallows. Like once you see all the
• 1:30
  Mac: hundreds of swallows on the river, the bugs are already in the air.
• 1:34
  Mac: And so that's always a surefire sign to switch over and move up, you know.
• 1:39
  Mac: But it's tough. I like to start everything at midday.
• 1:43
  Mac: People want to start early and get done early, you know. So a lot of times it
• 1:48
  Mac: doesn't coincide with what the fish are going to do, you know?
• 1:54
  Mac: Because I'd say the best dry fly activity on average the last couple of weeks
• 1:58
  Mac: has been probably 1 o'clock to 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
• 2:02
  Marvin: Yeah, that sounds about right. And we were talking before we started recording that,
• 2:06
  Marvin: you know, even though you've got multiple species coming off and you've probably
• 2:10
  Marvin: got a fair amount of size variation because usually those early mayflies are relatively large,
• 2:15
  Marvin: but then you've also got the small little guys like the blue winged olives but
• 2:18
  Marvin: you know we were talking about how people make fly selection you know too complicated.
• 2:25
  Mac: That's right. I think they overthink it. And really, when you have a whole lot
• 2:30
  Mac: of activity on top, like I'm talking like in a minute to have 40 or 50 rises
• 2:36
  Mac: a minute in a little area that you're watching.
• 2:39
  Mac: I don't think it matters when it's that kind of a frenzy, as long as the size,
• 2:43
  Mac: shape and color is even close, like even close.
• 2:46
  Mac: And I've done that a lot over the years just to prove a point,
• 2:49
  Mac: like put something like an elk hair caddis and there is no caddis,
• 2:53
  Mac: you know, and then that still works just as good as any other drop slot you'd pick.
• 2:56
  Mac: So I think that's kind of overrated. I think what people forget in the East
• 3:01
  Mac: Coast is it's very opportunistic fish in this part of the country.
• 3:05
  Mac: I think it's that way all up to Alleghenies, all the way to Maine.
• 3:09
  Mac: I don't think it's super selective anywhere that I've seen on the East Coast.
• 3:14
  Mac: So I think a lot of those early hatch books that we read in the early 70s about
• 3:20
  Mac: matching it exactly and all that, I think that's overrated, to be honest.
• 3:23
  Mac: But I mean, as long as you have something on there that's floating on top,
• 3:29
  Mac: then you could say, okay, you got a drift and nothing happened.
• 3:33
  Mac: Let's say you did a dead drift, and then next thing you do is you animate the
• 3:37
  Mac: fly, let it drift a second, animate it again, and all of a sudden you have a
• 3:40
  Mac: fish. I think a lot of it's from the actions of what the angler's doing,
• 3:45
  Mac: more so than the fly that they're picking.
• 3:49
  Marvin: Yeah, and I would say, too, probably that lack of selectivity is a function
• 3:53
  Marvin: of the fact that the reality is most of our rivers are freestones,
• 3:56
  Marvin: and as a result, they're relatively sterile, right?
• 3:59
  Marvin: So fish don't really want to let anything that looks like food pass them by
• 4:06
  Marvin: because it's not the buffet that it is in some other places in the country.
• 4:10
  Mac: That's right. Well, a good example, this was on Easter when the kids were small.
• 4:15
  Mac: Connor's going to be 18 in a couple of weeks.
• 4:18
  Mac: This is back when he was probably seven, so it was 11 years ago.
• 4:22
  Mac: But I remember walking up there on Easter weekend with the family,
• 4:26
  Mac: and I picked 10 dogwood leaves off of a bridge up high on Deep Creek.
• 4:30
  Mac: And this was just a fun little experiment because I knew what would happen.
• 4:34
  Mac: And so I had Jennifer and the kids looking off the bridge, and I rolled each
• 4:38
  Mac: one of those little dogwood leaves up to about the size of a pea and would drop it in the river.
• 4:44
  Mac: And eight of the ten dogwood leaves got eaten within three feet of drift.
• 4:48
  Mac: So how picky are fish? And this is when there wasn't a hatch and the fish weren't coming up.
• 4:52
  Mac: So if eight of ten leaves got eaten within three feet of drift and it wasn't
• 4:57
  Mac: even prime time when they're looking up, feeding on the surface,
• 5:00
  Mac: what's that tell us? Don't overthink your dry fly.
• 5:04
  Mac: And I think that's why I wanted to talk about this for the podcast just because
• 5:09
  Mac: I think people overthink it way more than they should.
• 5:13
  Marvin: Yeah, which then gets us to pattern. And I would say probably in our part of
• 5:17
  Marvin: the world, you know, orange and yellow elk hair caddis, probably a parachute Adams, right?
• 5:26
  Marvin: And then maybe something that sits a little bit higher up, you know,
• 5:31
  Marvin: not as flat in the water as a parachute style fly. I don't know,
• 5:34
  Marvin: maybe a humpy or something like that.
• 5:36
  Marvin: And, I mean, you pretty much got it covered. Yeah.
• 5:40
  Mac: Yeah, I think pretty much that would do it. And it's like those flies will skate
• 5:44
  Mac: well, like any traditional, like, Catskill-type flies are easy to skate and
• 5:49
  Mac: ride high up in the water.
• 5:51
  Mac: So if it's a windy day, having a fly that skates, because then it emulates the
• 5:55
  Mac: insects, because insects get blown a lot.
• 5:58
  Mac: So a good example, like a parachute sits flush down in the sun,
• 6:02
  Mac: but they don't get blown naturally like the naturals that are getting blown.
• 6:06
  Mac: You know what I mean? So a parachute's kind of tough to get blown on the surface.
• 6:11
  Mac: And a lot of times, this sounds crazy, but we've had a lot of wind the last
• 6:14
  Mac: week, like 20 to 30-mile-an-hour gusts, pretty constant here.
• 6:18
  Mac: And when you look at the naturals, they're actually getting blown upstream really pretty quick.
• 6:23
  Mac: And then when you put a fly out there and it's kind of just sitting in the current
• 6:27
  Mac: or moving downstream when all the other naturals are going upstream,
• 6:31
  Mac: just little things like that of changing styles of flies to match what the naturals
• 6:36
  Mac: are doing. makes, I think, a lot of times a big difference.
• 6:40
  Mac: That's something you don't hear about in those hatch books or anything.
• 6:43
  Mac: But there's a reason why those flies that will skate and blow like the naturals
• 6:49
  Mac: are a lot of times a better choice if it's windy.
• 6:52
  Marvin: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of that talk that I gave in Edison in Denver about trout food and you.
• 6:57
  Marvin: And it's like you don't have to remember all this stuff. If you just sit and
• 7:00
  Marvin: look and see what the food's doing, make your fly look like the food and behave like the food.
• 7:05
  Mac: That's right. Then it's going to be a much bigger ticket, I think,
• 7:10
  Mac: to success by doing that.
• 7:12
  Mac: And yeah, it's just the big thing right now is there's so many.
• 7:17
  Mac: Spring's such a wonderful time. I made a post the other day about the hatches,
• 7:21
  Mac: and some buddies in Ireland were texting me back and go, you know,
• 7:25
  Mac: it's prime time over there too, this time of year.
• 7:28
  Mac: And I think the thing is just to keep it simple and not overthink it.
• 7:32
  Mac: You know, don't worry about having the perfect bug. If it's the same size,
• 7:37
  Mac: shape, I mean, it doesn't even have to be the color.
• 7:39
  Mac: Because if you animate a fly, they're probably not going to see the color.
• 7:43
  Mac: I mean, if it's actually hopping and skittering and really moving erratic,
• 7:46
  Mac: all they know is something's there.
• 7:48
  Mac: And you're going to get what we call an impulse strike over something that's
• 7:52
  Mac: selective where they can roll up.
• 7:55
  Mac: And I'm sure people have dry-flied. They've seen that where the fish rolls up,
• 7:59
  Mac: it's pecked sands, and it follows it two or three feet downstream looking at it.
• 8:03
  Mac: And decides he doesn't want to eat it, you don't have to worry about those kind
• 8:07
  Mac: of behaviors when you actually animate it.
• 8:10
  Mac: You know, you're going after the one that wants to come and get it right then.
• 8:15
  Mac: A little bit different strategy.
• 8:17
  Marvin: Yeah, so we're kind of navigating this kind of shoulder season. It's kind of funny.
• 8:20
  Marvin: I think we've had a 20-degree temperature drop here in Charlotte,
• 8:24
  Marvin: and I know it's windy here. It's got to be howling where you are.
• 8:26
  Marvin: But, you know, I know you've got schools coming up.
• 8:30
  Marvin: You want to let folks know about those. And also, I know that you got people
• 8:33
  Marvin: reaching out that want to get on the water.
• 8:36
  Mac: Yeah, no, that'd be good. The big thing for this month coming up after the –
• 8:42
  Mac: we've got a school that's coming up.
• 8:44
  Mac: It's a casting two-day weekend school, April 27th, 28th, and we've still got
• 8:50
  Mac: some room in that toward the end of April.
• 8:53
  Mac: That's probably one of my favorite things of the whole year.
• 8:56
  Mac: That one in September, we do a two-day weekend.
• 9:00
  Mac: Advanced line control class here for fly casting, and that's always a lot of
• 9:05
  Mac: fun. and then the trips, the same information's on the same site at mackgroundflyfish.com,
• 9:11
  Mac: and they can find that info on there pretty easy.
• 9:15
  Marvin: Well, there you go. Well, listen, folks, it's warming up.
• 9:20
  Marvin: We're gonna have a nice week or so of weather, I think, once this front passes
• 9:24
  Marvin: through, and you owe it to yourself to get out there and catch a few.
• 9:27
  Marvin: Tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Mack.
• 9:30
  Mac: Tight lines, Marvin.