A fishing buddy of mine says he couldn't care less about all the taxonomic names of insects, and complains there's more Latin to wade through than Virgil. But a knowledge of entomology does help you catch more trout during a hatch. And if you understand the stages of aquatic insects — especially how and when to imitate them — you can dispense with the Latin. Below are tales of experiences I've had with five spring hatches. Be careful not to learn too much about hatches, because it's a proven fact that the more time you spend trying to tie an exact match of a crippled Hexagenia, the less you will fish. It's an illness you want to avoid.

Caddis Flies

My brothers-in-law David and Kenny had caught a couple of trout between them all morning long. I was having a shutout kind of day, having caught nary a trout on this unnamed south central Colorado stream we fished each summer for the last twenty years

Tying on a caddis

I had worked the edges with dropper rigs, had switched flies about every other pool. Hatches and rises were nonexistent, even in the long glides along the cutbanks where we almost always saw a trout feeding.

Late in the afternoon, with a high sun, under the cover of alders, we finished a quick streamside lunch, if you want to call a granola bar and a swig of water lunch, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a 13-inch rainbow jump clear out of the water.

About that same time, both David and Kenny swatted at the insects dipping around their faces. And the light went on in each of our thick heads — a caddis hatch was on.

A Lesson Learned

Funny thing with caddis hatches — most anglers see the trout coming out of the water and they immediately turn to fishing dry flies, usually the tried and trusted Elk Hair Caddis. We three had made the same mistake for years but somewhere along the line had figured out the secret to these hatches.

Trout on the line

I looked and all three of us had green cased caddis pupa in our hands tying them on. Kenny favored the Lafontaine Green Sparkle Pupa but David and I chose a plastic hardshell lime-green pattern, which, when fished downstream and on the rise of the fly on the tail end of the arc, would almost certainly produce a vicious strike.

For two hours, with blonde caddis adults dancing and darting in the air, skittering upstream on the surface, we fished nymphs downstream and across to rising trout.

We caught a lot of trout, one of those days where when you caught yet another one, you looked up- or downstream to see if one of the others had a fish on (and they both usually did).

Teenage Tutoring

We even had a teenage boy come traipsing through the heavy streamside vegetation because, from the bridge, he had seen us catching trout hand over fist.

"I've been fishing Elk Hair Caddis in all colors and sizes and haven't caught but three fish all day," he told us. "What in the heck are y'all doing to catch so many?"

We love rookies and for the next hour, until the slashes and leaps ended, Kenny and David and I took turns playing tutor, handing out caddis pupa and larva patterns, and cutting out about ten years of caddis hatch futility that we ourselves had gone through.

There are enough things in a teenage boy's life to worry about without having to find fishing difficult as well.