Fall fling: September ideal month to cast for trout

This is a busy month with families centered around kids and schools. Suntans are fading with memories from summer innertube parties on area trout streams.

Fall sports are fully revved up. Fans can easily devote an entire weekend to a Cougar football game. Fruit harvest is underway and so are hunting seasons.

No wonder September is such a great time for an angler to sneak off and go fly fishing!

Cutthroat trout streams have made a dramatic transition this month from the heat and smoke that suffocated the region early in the month to chilly mornings, clearing skies and water temperatures ideal for trout. While streamers are fall favorite patterns for hooking big fish, September trout sometimes are unbelievably eager to take a dry fly.

Ten days ago, wet wading was the rule. This week, September anglers are packing their waders to the mountain streams.

Last weekend, more bowhunters than anglers were trekking still-dusty trails along cutthroat streams in the upper Clearwater River region.

Thursday began with the temperature in the 40s and light rain on the Kootenai River in Idaho, but by 9:30 a.m., Leanna Young had already given up swinging her soft-hackle selection and was catching rainbows, cutthroats and cuttbows by drifting dry flies.

The Seattle resident has devoted two weeks of her annual vacation for years to learning the Kootenai from Libby to Bonners Ferry. She has boxes of flies with dozens of patterns to select from as the season, month, week, day and hour evolves.

“What the fish will eat can change minute by minute, especially this time of year,” she said.

On Thursday, for whatever reason, none of the fancy flies in her arsenal caught more fish than a black midge in the morning and a simple hopper or old-fashioned parachute Adams for most of the afternoon. Mahogany duns, caddis, midges, blue-wing olives, terrestrials and God knows what else made active appearances.

Most of the Kootenai trout she caught were in the foot-long range, but she hooked bigger fish last week. Idaho Fish and Game Department biologist Ryan Hardy confirmed that the river fertilization project near the Montana-Idaho state line and the Kootenai Tribe’s stream habitat work upstream from Bonners Ferry is resulting in more bugs and bigger trout in the river.

“My biggest tip for fishing right now is don’t be asleep at the wheel,” said Sean Visintainer of Silver Bow Fly Shop in Spokane Valley. “Fish have seen plenty of bugs, real and fake, by this time of season. They will give you one shot, make them count!”

And think ahead. Brown and bull trout are moving to spawn, and while it’s still September, rainbows and cutthroats may be looking up for October caddis.