Fishing Report: Rapidan River

Looks like we're going to have some pretty high rivers here for the next week thanks to that monsoon that can through central Virginia yesterday.  The water levels in the upper portions of the Rapidan over the weekend definitely spiked, fortunately, however, it looks like we didn't quite hit flood levels.  Not sure how long we'll have to wait until we have conditions as good as they were last week. 

Speaking of last week, fishing was freaking fantastic.  Scott, the proverbial master of small stream fly fishing, was able to take some time off from studying for his Step 1 to grace Rich and me with his presence.  Of course, with the forecast calling for a sunny day and 80 degree weather last Sunday, we had to hit up the Rapidan. 

We headed up to the section around Rapidan Camp to ensure we wouldn't have any company.  Right from the start we could see brookies feeding on dry flies.  Not just a few either.  We split up and put on our respective favorites for the park, Scott with an elk hair caddis, Richie with something that probably was of the royal adams family (i'm guessing, correct me if i'm wrong), and me with a parachute adams.  They all seemed to work great.  Three hours later, we all were worn out and were plenty satisfied with the more than 50 fish we each caught.  Seriously, it was probably the best day on the Rapidan I've had in several years.  We got on the water right when two mayfly hatches, which looked like blue wing olives and something larger and brown like a quill gordon or march brown, were occurring.  I switched to a BWO spinner and definitely started getting more strikes.  These brookies were going absolutely nuts.  I think I only hit up about eight pools in three hours but was able to put out at least ten brook trout, all in the 8-10 inch range, from each.  By the end of our day (only around 4:00pm), the females were depositing their eggs and a decent number of spinners were on the water.  At that point, the brookies started feeding even more aggressively.  My last pool had about eight large trout in it who were all competing for the flies coming down the buffet line.  It was amazing seeing them go airborne and slamming into each other as they fought for the fly.  I had never seen such aggressiveness on the Rapidan.  I managed to get a videoclip of one of them going airborne:

From rapidan river 4.10.11

Hopefully, once these high water levels settle out, we'll be able to hit up the park again for some more brookies.  Let us know if you've had similar success!

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.