October Caddis and the Classic GP
Words and Images by Dana Sturn
WHEN OCTOBER CADDIS ARRIVE, YOUR GENERAL PRACTICIONER IS WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO BE.
When it comes to steelhead, I tend to think like a trout fisher. I never think of flies as "attractor patterns"; I'm always wondering what they imitate. In fact, I find it really tough to fish anything that doesn’t look like something I think a steelhead might actually like to eat.
A quick history lesson: back near the Dawn of Time—the 1950s—a chap named Esmond Drury designed a shrimpy-looking Atlantic salmon fly in response to a ban on prawns as bait in salmon rivers. He called his fly The General Practitioner and the name stuck. Over the next few decades, as flyfishing for steelhead took hold in North America, fly-fishers looked to the Atlantic salmon traditions for guidance and inspiration, and the General Practitioner—now known more simply as the GP—found its way into the fly boxes of Pacific Northwest steelhead anglers.
Last October I was swinging a smal, orange GP—your basic “shrimp fly”--through a twilight tailout when a chrome hen climbed on. After a wild eight-minute ride I had her on her side and remember wondering why steelhead still like shrimp flies so far from the ocean. On the lower Dean River, where you're hooking fish that might have arrived on the tide, it made sense. But 200 miles inland? Those fish haven’t seen a sea creature in weeks; meanwhile, all sorts of river dwellers have floated by and I figure the fish have taken notice. The next evening, on the same pool, the same fly failed me. But I did see a large insect flopping around on the water and started wondering about Dicosmoecus pupa, the pre-emergence stage of the legendary October caddis. What color was this bug, what did it look like, and how did it behave?
There's no one better to ask about bugs than the Bugman himself, Rick Hafele. Hafele is an aquatic entomologist and longtime fly-fishing author and instructor with numerous well-known books and instructional DVD’s to his credit, including the western fly fisher’s bible Western Hatches, which he co-wrote with Dave Hughes. I dug through Western Hatches to unearth what I could about Dicosmoecus.
Any trout fisher who knows their bugs will be familiar with the October caddis life cycle. They can be found in numerous rivers ranging from California to Alaska. When you find a good steelhead run you'll also discover a solid population of October caddis larvae. The larvae crawl around the streambed, protected by cases they make from stuff they find, such as pebbles and plant material, doing things that larvae will do until they are ready to pupate. Then they seal themselves securely inside their larval cases, and after four to six weeks the mature pupa cut their way out of the case and make their way into shallow water where they crawl out onto rocks and emerge as adults. As the pupa journeys to the shallows it's always in danger of being swept into the currents, making it an easy meal for hungry trout and juvenile steelhead. The adults are good fish food too. They can be fairly large--the size of a grasshopper or golden stonefly--and at twilight in September and October you'll find them flopping around on the surface depositing eggs.
Whether tied in orange, red, tan or brown, the General Practitioner is a decent match for fall caddis.
Hafele sent me a picture of a Dicosmoecus pupa he collected on Idaho’s Clearwater River and guess what? It looked enough like the little orange GP that hooked my steelhead--brown at the front; orange at the back--that it had me re-thinking some of the things I believed about my small GP-style steelhead flies. This wasn’t the first time a small orange GP had worked for me: I often switch to it in the morning after the first light fishing is done, and steelhead seem to like it then too. Could steelhead, I wondered, take these flies for Dicosmoecus pupa? So, I asked Hafele.
"For trout at least, the best time to fish pupa patterns is in the morning," Hafele said. “Can't say what's on the mind of a steelhead, but it makes sense to me."
I used to fish skaters a lot in the fall, but these days I prefer to fish wet. I could happily do this for the rest of my days, and when I look at the Fall Caddis and Thompson River Caddis, both tied by Harry Lemire, I'm struck by how much these flies suggest not only the adult October caddis, but the pupa as well. Fished as Lemire fished them--"damp"--without a hitch, these flies sometimes ride just subsurface; other times they skim along the top leaving a wake, effectively suggesting the behaviour of the pupa, the egg laying adult, and perhaps a drowned adult, all in one cast. A small, orange GP, tied on a plastic tube and fished greased line, would do pretty much the same thing. This seems to me the perfect approach early in the season, before the crowds show up, when the October caddis is about and the first steelhead arrive, bright, aggressive fish that haven't been hassled and always seem to be looking up. And it makes the trout fisher in me happy to think that steelhead can be taken by fishing a pattern that suggests something a steelhead might recognize as October caddis, even if those little GPs kinda look like a shrimp.