OWYHEE RIVER, Ore. - Three hefty brown trout swirled 20 feet away, sipping bugs just below the surface, their orange spots flashing in the sunshine.
I dropped a cast upstream, trying to entice a strike with a large dry fly, used as a strike indicator, and a tiny nymph suspended below it as a dropper. The pair floated over the feeding fish.
Nothing.
I retrieved the flies and watched a 20-incher open its enormous mouth to swallow a bug smaller than I could see. Another cast and another refusal.
After a third cast, the fish disappeared. I don't know if sloppy casting on my part or the end of a hatch caused the browns to quit feeding. Either way, I could see a pattern developing, and not the kind you stash in your fly box. I was afraid I was going to get skunked on yet another of the West's blue-ribbon trout streams.
I've had similar experiences on central Idaho's Silver Creek and the Henry's Fork in southeastern Idaho. Both, like the Owyhee, hold sophisticated trout that have tantalizing seconds to check out your offering as it drifts by in slow currents. It's not like the Lochsa River or Kelly Creek where floating large dry flies through riffles can entice slashing hits from cutthroat.
But unlike my other frustrating trips to famous streams, this time I had an advantage - guide Dave Tucker. My son, Andy, who lives in Boise, had fished with Tucker a couple of previous times and lined him up for our trip earlier this month. We met Tucker at his shop in Parma, Idaho, and took the half-hour drive to the river, which is just across the border in Oregon.
Tucker has been fishing the Owyhee for 30 years and guiding it for 10. He gave us some history while we drove. It is a tailwater fishery that supports some rainbows, but mostly brown trout. Cold water seeps out of the bottom of Owyhee Dam, providing ideal habitat and a healthy bug population to feed the trout. Even though it winds through a desert, flow out of the dam is cool enough to support the fish. The small river is easily accessible from a paved road that runs along it to the base of the dam.
While the dam was built in 1933, the browns weren't planted until the 1990s. They've thrived and the population sustains itself without planting. Fishing for browns is catch-and-release only, but bait and lures with treble hooks are allowed. Anglers can kill five rainbow daily. Even with the odd regulations, the browns have prospered.
The fishery has also become hugely popular regionally and even nationally. There are lots of browns and they average 16 to 20 inches long. Because it is a tailwater, the Owyhee isn't greatly affected by spring runoff. That means anglers visit from throughout the Northwest when other streams aren't fishable. It's only an hour or so from Boise, so it gets hit hard by Treasure Valley anglers. Tucker said the pressure is most intense in the spring and then again in mid-September.
There's only about 10 miles of prime fishing water, and that makes it harder to spread out the pressure. We fished it on a Thursday. It was crowded but we still found plenty of water to wade.
Tucker usually doesn't bother fishing early in the morning. The bug hatches start mid-morning and he thinks it's mostly a waste of time to fish when there isn't a hatch. He's found the hatches drop off late in the afternoon and then restart just before dark.
One unusual aspect of the Owyhee is its color, caused by the alkaline soil in the region, Tucker said. Much of the year the water is a milky green and that can hamper wading because you can't see the rocks on the bottom, even where it's only 3-feet deep.
But that wasn't as much the case when we visited. Flows were on the low side and we had several feet of visibility.
The Owyhee offers some riffles, occasional rock gardens and a lot of long, slow pools with mossy banks. The banks are often willow-covered and that means you need to know how to roll cast if you don't want to spend time retrieving flies from branches.
Hatches the day we were there were inconsistent, as was the fishing. We spent a lot of time driving from hole to hole while Tucker looked for rising fish. I didn't mind it as it allowed me to rest my weary knees and take in the gorgeous, high-desert scenery.
When we were on the water, we almost always used a two- or three-fly set up, with a dry fly on top, followed by weighted size 18 and 20 nymphs. Trying to match the hatch, we used blue-winged olives, pale morning duns and caddis imitations.
Most of the fish we caught were on nymphs. Andy hooked three fish on three casts, but then the bite quickly shut down. We often saw two or three different kinds of bugs hatching at the same time, but the hatches were short and light.
I caught fish after finally doing a better job of controlling the drift of my flies, which means floating the flies down the stream at the same rate as the current. Any kind of unnatural movement of the flies, caused by poor control of the fly line, and the fish ignored the offering.
Flawless drifts are crucial, Tucker said. "These fish are a lot more drift-shy than leader-shy," he said.
My big moment came when I hooked a 19-inch fish that charged downstream and stripped off all my fly line and 20 feet of my backing. As I fought the fish, I realized something wasn't quite right.
After the brown hit the nymph at the bottom of the rig, the larger dry fly at the top had hooked into the fish near the tail. The fish turned sideways in the current and I had a hard time controlling it. Luckily, Tucker was able to net and release it.
We ended the day sitting beside a run we had earlier fished, waiting until almost 10 p.m. for a hatch that didn't happen. Andy tried without luck to entice a fish by stripping a large streamer.
But I didn't mind. I was content watching the twilight deepen and listening to a pair of great-horned owls echo their hoots off the red cliffs that rimmed the other side of the stream.
I caught three or four fish and lost about the same. Andy, agile enough to climb down banks that I avoided, doubled my catch.
We didn't see the 29-inch brown that lives in a deep pool that Tucker told us about. That's a challenge for another day. But I did leave feeling a lot better than I did the last time I crawled out of Silver Creek.
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Emerson is retired after 29 years as managing editor of the Lewiston Tribune.
