Dry Fly Innovations

Intermittent sunshine, light breeze, and 40 degrees, its still pretty winter like on the South Fork of the Boise River, but the BWO hatches are beginning to kick off.

Around 2:00 in the afternoon a few BWO began to pop, but there weren’t enough of them to bring the fish to the surface.  So there were a few fish taking across a long stretch of water, but nothing close enough to serve a fly to.  I slowly worked my way down through the hole and all of a sudden, bingo a fish rises about 20 feet away down stream in perfect position to cast to.  The tie on fly was a #22 3X long no hackle BWO.  I served the fly about 2 feet above his rise and let it float naturally to his position.  Bang!  He took and a nice gentle set seated the hook for a long fight.  After few minutes beautiful big rainbow was in the net.

That was the story for the rest of the day, I tried quite a few locations around Cow Creek, but the hatch was sparse and intermittent.  Luckily I was in position on three other fish that surfaced and every one of them took the offering and ended up in the net.  I’m really sure if the hatch was more abundant it could have been a pretty big day.  But hey that’s dry fly fishing Idaho in the winter!!!

The four fish landed were caught on the following flies:  2 on BWO no hackle #22, 1 on BWO Emerger #22, and 1 on BWO upright wing adult #20.