Fishing Conditions and Hatches: Fair-Good

Good news for now and the future: They just started running water through the tunnel so flows are up. Short term it'll bring more fish out of Crowley. For both short and long term it will help clean out the river channel, especially down in the lake bottom for next year. Over the next couple of days bigger and brighter is the call. Hmmm, interesting, flows are up to the highest non-runoff level in a long time.

Luckily as temperatures drop Hot Creek water is becoming beneficial. We are now seeing the water temperatures in the low to mid 60's all the way down to the lake. This helps trigger the fish in Crowley to move up into colder, cleaner water of the river. We're already seeing some lake fish all the way up into the private ranches with more to follow. There is a temperature gauge on Hot Creek right above the Owens River Road bridge. You can tell fall is here because instead of 97-112 temperature range of summer it's all the way down to 94-107 degrees, a good rule of thumb is fish below Hot Creek in the morning and above later in the day.  If you're not familiar with it, to get to the upper most branch of Hot Creek, go through the first drive through gate on the main road and immediately turn left. The confluence is between the first and second walk-thru gates. 

 The Tricos are starting to fade but the fish are still eating them, the down side being they're #24-26 . The Trico emergence is still around 6-8 for the female emergence and 9-10 for the spinner fall. Don't forget that the fish will eat drowned Trico spinners well after the egg laying. As they drift downstream they will hold their attention long after the spinner fall ends. BWO hatch has just started back up and the fish are getting interested.  The caddis are fading but the midges are around forever. The Lake fish are a little skittish when they first enter the river and also completely ignorant to the food sources so don't be afraid to throw perch fry, #14-18 midge imitations and large attractor nymphs, their comfort food. The most effective technique is nymphing with an attractor pattern and a small midge or mayfly nymph trailing.

That 1/2 moth 1/2 caddis white insect you see zig zagging close to the water is an aquatic moth. Not much is known about their life cycle, but you may have run across the larval form and not even known it. If you get hung up on the bottom and what you bring up looks like a small, ragged leaf, turn it over. If there's a line of organic matter down the middle that's the moth larva.

DF&G calls it the 4th of July run. When the temperatures get warmer in Crowley and the algae growing the 12" - 20" browns have moved into the river and are throughout the system. Once in the system they will stay until spawning late fall to early winter.

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