I thought I'd append to this thread my report of fishing on the Wood River yesterday morning. It was a perfect morning for fishing, althought the flow of the river was slower than I was expecting after all the rain the previous two days. It's only the second time I've fished it, so I actually don't know the typical conditions.
The short of this story is that I caught no fish, despite working lots of rising fish in the afternoon below the Pines parking area. I also fished for 3 hours in the bends below the Check Station in the morning and saw all of one rising fish and caught nothingon woolybuggers. There weren't even very many kayakers whom I can blame. My only consolation is that on the way out I chatted with a guy who looked and talked the part of a Wood River veteran, and he too walked off with a patch full of flies he'd tried that didn't catch any fish.
It suffices to say either: a) I suck, or b) they were picky, and I couldn't figure out what they were eating. For the sake of my vanity, let's assume b), since there was a great variety of insects floating by but no one type predominated. After all my frustration, you can imagine I studied the foam line pretty closely, and watching it for five minutes, I might see a couple BWO (including one remarkable one in about size 12!), several very small bugs that looked most like Griffith's Gnat, a caddis and caddis pupa shucks (I think) here and there. The only thing out of the ordinary I saw were these flat round spider-like creatures about the diameter of a nickel, light brown with six or so legs. If it's that they were feasting on, I had nothing to imitate it. So, there were bugs going by, but nothing I could be sure was the fish's passion.
I'll surely fish the Wood again, since it's just such a nice place to fish. But I won't hide my frustration over the picky fish.
. . . or, was it a)?