Early Season East Lake Fishing

If you read my post last week, Hoping for Hatching Callibaetis Mayflies, I thought I’d provide an update on our early season East Lake fishing experience. And be sure to check out a Non-Twist Knot I’ve started to experiment with for some of the bigger flies I fish. You’ll find it at the end of my post.

I had high expectations about hitting the Callibaetis mayfly hatch last week at East Lake. Turns out we were at least a week to ten days early this year. I guess our late season snow had an impact.

We did catch a few fish each day, but not how we hoped.

The successful flies ended up being Beetle Bailey and something I call a Simple Beetle which Jeff Perin of The Fly Fisher’s Place taught my fly club in 2018.

We usually land a few Brown Trout, but this trip the catch ended up being Rainbows.

I think we saw a total of TWO Callibaetis mayflies!

The weather was beautiful and the East Lake Campground opened the previous weekend. We camped with some friends for a couple of nights. Yes, the wind came up each day, but the first two days were great.

And then Thursday morning at 3 am the rain started.

Here is an image of the morning we left and after the rain stopped for awhile.

On the morning we packed up and left, a friend found this damsel nymph swimming close to shore.

Perhaps I should have slowly stripped a damsel nymph imitation.

Oh, I heard the next day it snowed!!

Perhaps we’ll try it again next week. Right now I’m concentrating on Green Drakes…

As promised, here is an interesting knot I’ve tried recently.

Have you experienced your fly twisting the leader? Here is a great idea from the Deschutes Angler Fly Shop in Maupin, OR about how to eliminate the twisting of leader when using large or bushy flies.

I’ve had this problem when fishing the Beetle Bailey and other larger flies like a Hatchmaster Green Drake. I fish with a lot of 6X tippet, which is very light. Bushy flies seem to twist when casting and can create a twisted mess to your tippet.

Sometimes I change to 5X tippet. It helps, but still I find twists.

When I saw this short video, I decided to give it a try.

It’s a simple ideas. Thread your original leader through the hook eye and tie a triple surgeon’s loop with a larger piece of mono, Trim the tag ends, leaving a knot large enough that won’t pull through the eye.

When casting the fly, it should spin around the knot and your leader won’t end up twisted.

I’m still experimenting with how big of mono to use when tying the triple surgeon knot for 6X. Amy used 10 lb with 4X leader.

I’ll let you know what I find out.

Enjoy…go fish!