Green River below Flaming Gorge

The river

The Green below Flaming Gorge is often called the best tailwater in the American West, and the numbers support it: the A section between the dam and Little Hole carries several thousand catchable trout per kilometre, with rainbows that commonly run 40 to 55 cm. It is also a big river — 100 metres wide in places — so the techniques that work here are about reach and drift length rather than delicate pocket work.

On this river

Cicada years

In a strong cicada year, which arrives on its own cycle, the big rainbows stop looking at anything else for two to three weeks. The insect is clumsy, loud and lands with a thud, which means a foam fly dropped from 30 cm above the surface out-fishes a delicate presentation. Fish the shaded cliff-side willows in the middle hours of the day.

Long drifts on a wide river

The Green is too wide to reach the far bank, so the useful cast is a 20-metre downstream mend that keeps the fly in the near seam for eight seconds longer than a straight cast would. Use a stack mend rather than a single curve and let the indicator travel in the same lane as the fly.

Reading scud water

Scuds live in weed, not in gravel. On the Green that means the slow, weedy margins between the fast lanes, and the fish that are on scuds are usually within two metres of the bank. If you are fishing the middle of the river you are fishing for mayfly eaters only, and you are ignoring most of the biomass.