Fishing Report: Rapidan River 3-21

Boards studying in now in full swing but it's been pretty easy to get stir-crazy still being in the library. Thus, with the threat of more rain coming our way, I decided to make a quick morning trip up to the Rapidan to see how the fishing was.

My initial impression was that the water levels were running a little too high. While I was able to fish most of the day with dry flies, it was extremely difficult to get any quality dead drifts. The first couple were caught on a 2-fly dropper setup with a parachute adams on top and a peasant tail nymph on bottom. A majority of them preferred the nymph, much to my chagrin. After a long winter I was going through a pretty serious dry fly withdrawal. Finally at about 11 am, the brook trout started honing in on some weak hatches that were going on. From what I could tell, there was a decent number of black caddis (or some kind of caddis, I'm not the most legit entomologist quite yet) and the usual midges.

All in all it was a great day to be out on the water despite the difficult water level. I will probably wait until things have settled down even more before I head out there again. But if you're a fan of throwing nymphs and your pack is full of humpies, then by all means take a chance out there. And of course, always be careful when wading in those high and fast conditions.

First VAMFF Trip to Rapidan River in '09

Sunday, Rich, Kyle, and I hit up the Rapidan for our first day up in the Shenandoah National Park of the season.  Thanks to the three days of warm weather and the slightly increased water levels, the conditions were perfect.  Central Virginia has been going through quite a drought lately.  If you check out the USGS data from the area, you'll see that the mean daily discharge is for a river like the Rapidan is at least 600 cfs, but lately we've been seeing discharges of about 200 cfs.  Regardless, the warm weather led to several hatches occurring while we were out on the river.

From what I could tell, I tried to take pictures of the flies to post on here, it looked like we had some black caddis and blue wing olive flies hatching Sunday.  Here's some great footage of this fly in all of its forms (I apologize for the absolutely terrible narration):

For more information about the caddis, be sure to check out Rich's post, The (mighty) Caddis, from a little while ago.  As for the BWOs, I only saw a few so it was by no means a heavy hatch.  Still we seemed to all have more luck throwing out BWO patterns, quill gordons, and Mr. Rapidan parachute adams than we did with elk hair caddis flies.  

Rich fishing a slow moving pool

I won't start spouting off numbers here, but we caught plenty of fish to make the day perfect (it would have been a great day even without the fish as any day out on the river is better than a day in the library studying).  Here's a couple more shots taken with my iphone of the trip.  I really need to get a good camera for these trips...

Largest brookie of the day, pretty long but not too fat, obviously was hungry

Kyle's first brookie ever from the Rapidan (who cares if it's small, he got it literally on his second cast out.  Either that's some great beginner's luck or the guy's got skills)

Check out the beautiful spots on this guy!

Again, this was still a really early trip into the Park.  I expect the fishing to heat up even more by mid-April.  If any other VAMFF members want to hit it up in the near future, let Rich and I know, as we'll gladly take y'all up there again.