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Yellow sallies n large yellow stoneflies in VT

PinelandsGillie

I want to move to the green mountains
Just got back to NJ after taking the family up to the new haven / middlebury and neshobe river area. Took some fish on oversized stimulators n ausable wulffs n haystacks. Lots of yellow sallies hatching and say some big yellow stone flys. Was using an apple caddis to imitate yellow sallies but did not get any takes. Kept a few stocked fish and examined there stomach. Some had large yellow stones and quite a few chartreuse yellow sallies or little green stoneflies. Thinking of tying some patterns for next weekend when I return to pickup my son from his grandmothers. Has anybody taken a trout on yellow sallie hatch? I didn't see any rises and not too educated on how they emerge but they look like they were coming out of the surface film like mayflies. I fished some dry dropper rigs with yellow stones large n small but had no takes. Any advice on these hatches?
 
Stoneflies of all types can be a pain and at times it looks like they are eating adults but are really chasing nymphs as they rise to the surface. This is a very tough thing to imitate. You will often get advice from shops saying swing a wet fly and fish subsurface, but in my experience this will at best take a few fish and mostly the pesky small-mid sized fish, not the brutes. Its also very hard to entice a fish to take while also not being broken off- since the strikes are usually hard takes on the swing. Greasing a soft hackle so its floating but looks like a emerged has worked at times, but not consistently for me. Usually when fish in a spot are on emergers- I change fish, and not flies. Find a fish with a sipping rise that is clearly rising on the surface and then go through your rotation of flies. As larry at west brand angler used to say "sometimes, you just aint gunna get him".
 
Stoneflies mostly emerge at night on the east coast, and they do it by crawling onto rocks...so there isn't really a stonefly emerger stage for fishing purposes. You can often see the leftover exoskeletons laying around. They are fairly poor fliers, so try a stimulator at night, and feel free to twitch it some.
 
The yellow sallies in the Pequest climb up rocks to hatch and if you look closely they climb up some mid stream rocks more than others. I have had some luck casting nymphs and wets right around the rocks with the most stoneflies on it (especially if it is in a run with a lot of fish) and have had better luck fishing dries along the seams downstream at night. However, while I've caught a few I can only remember one time over decades of fishing there when I really caught a bunch. The ones that crawl to shore are a tougher game and I swing wets towards shore, like you do for isos, with a fraction of the success. Trout seem to like the isos better.
 
If you saw them on the water, they were most likely laying eggs. They do this throughout the summer, and fish can be taken on an egg laying stimulator or similar pattern fishing it along the margins of fast water, where the naturals lay their eggs. I'll blind fish this pattern when I see the flies around and take fish.

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