Napa Valley Fly Guides 

                                                                                                                       

 Hi and welcome to my Putah Creek report Clients and myself have been seeing some really brightly colored fish with that unusually bright chrome look with nice size this early in the season. The numbers are not what I would hope for but the trout I'm getting to net with clients are really nice and willing to play ball if the presentation is good and the correct fly is presented. 

As I stated in my previous report, try stripping in extra line before executing your mend. It makes sense to remove as much line as possible from the water before you start mending. A lot of the time I get better results by stripping in a little and then I don't need to mend nearly as aggressively to achieve the same results.

There's a lot more going on than you might think: I suspect even I have things I have yet to fully understand on how to get a perfect drift. I've come to understand much of this by simply standing at a riffle and throwing cast after cast over and over again thinking about what is happening and how to make a better drift. Is my leader to short or long? Is the fly ahead or behind the indicator? Is my line causing drag? Sometimes I think I must be a little mad to have spent so much time fishing the same creek, but it results in hooking up regularly on this very challenging technical creek. 

I've spent a lot of time fishing Putah but I don't claim to know it all. The floods change the topography of the river so what worked on a specific riffle one season is so different the next it is hard to put a finger on it. Certain areas like #5 are completely different this year.

Flows will continue to rise this spring, and the creek will continue to fish better as we move towards summer, but I honestly don't really enjoy the high flows that come with July, August and September. Flows over 470 cfs gets to be a bit much, but I still fish and guide, I just prefer a little less flow plus I like to fish from the back side and wading can get dicey with flows over 500cfs.

Guide fly tip: For the next few weeks try using  #14 San Juan Worm or any Tungsten bead head flys to get down as quickly as possible and have brought me fish to net as of late.

Please feel free to call for available dates 

April,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,22,23,24,25,26,28,29,30

Thank you

Richard Loft 

(707)294-4738

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