Salmon Flies on the Henry's Fork Craig Richardson
“Dude, it's go time. They’re starting to fly. It's going to be wild.”
It's a hatch that people from around the world dream of seeing. The Henry’s Fork salmon fly hatch is one of the pinnacles of trout fishing around the world. These oversized bugs make some of the biggest trout in Western rivers show themselves.
and the big bugs are getting closer to the bank.” The night before we were meant to get on the water TJ called me again, “Dude, it's go time. They’re starting to fly. It's going to be wild. Make sure your camera batteries are charged.”
This year has been pretty peculiar with chaos and unrest everywhere. I was one of the few lucky people that would be able to hit the Henry’s Fork through the salmon fly hatch and possibly get to see it in all its glory.
We planned on meeting at 08:00 to drive up to the river. We live about forty-five minutes from the boat ramp and arrived at Ora Bridge to an absolute shit show of cars. It turned out that the information had been shared throughout the West. Utah and Montana license plates flooded the parking lot.
I was getting settled back into my Idaho lifestyle when out-of-state fishing licenses we not being sold. This completely flipped my world again, knowing I could potentially not be able to fish until sometime in June. I was told “you’ll probably have to wait until the 15th of June to get a license”. Bear in mind this was around the 5th of May so I was pretty upset that I would have to more than a month to fish again. Luckily the governor of Idaho opened fishing to people from out of State on the 16th of May and the bugs had not started their migration to the banks to hatch. It ended up all falling perfectly in place.
We knew it was going to be a somewhat busy but we didn’t expect to see around fifty cars in the parking lot. I was a little pessimistic because I’ve seen how these fish can completely shut off with too much pressure. TJ cracked a breakfast beer and told me not to worry, “these fish gotta eat man, they know they don’t have much time”. We lifted the anchor and moved down river to try open up some space. I was up first while TJ was on the oars. He keep saying “as tight as you can get it to the bank is where you need to be at all times. Anything more than thirty centimetres from the bank is too far, you’ll only get the babies.”
I got a call one evening from my buddy TJ Powell saying we need to be on the river in three days time. “The water is almost ready www.saflyfishingmag.co.za
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