Frustrating hatch last evening

[PENZZZ]

After sitting around all of September waiting for rain, I relented and went to Penns yesterday afternoon. From about 5:45 to 6:45 I fished over particularly aggressive feeding trout. Definitely more than 10% of the eats saw fish completely leaving the water, usually vertically. I never did figure out what they wanted.

My leader was roughly 12' from line to fly. The water was slow. I was getting long drag free drifts. There were at least two regular feeders withing 20' of where I stood. There was a light hatch of tan mayflies for maybe 20 minutes in the middle of this action.

I tried: Black Cricket, BWO, Caddis, Caddis Emerger, smallish Slate Drake, and a couple other random emerger patterns. I caught a couple small fall fish and a decent SMB, all on the BWO.

When I suspect I've only got an hour, should I change more often? I wanted to put a good drift over every fish I could reach, and that left me suspecting I lost a lot of time fishing the wrong flies. I though about midges, but was reluctant to believe fish would expend that much effort for such small food.

About 6:45 an otter joined me and completely put the fish down. It swam up to within about 30' of me to look me over. Even after I alerted it, it was still there swimming around 100 yards upstream as I left.

Observation is very critical this time of year. The trout leaping from the water were taking “whitish” Cahill spinners. Oddly, these spinners hover 4”-5” above the water’s surface, frequently darting left and right. Very different activity than exhibited by other mayflies. I would love to tell you how to catch Penns trout that are feeding in this manner but it is rare that I’m successful in this situation. A matching spinner pattern dead drifted over the leaping trout’s location will be ignored.

 

[Duriensbane]

Can confirm that there is a small pack of otters living between Wiekert and Poe. 3-4 of them, i have them on video but it is to long to upload here. They were in a slow pool dropping down and pulling what i suspect are crayfish from the rocks, there were also signs of them taking fish (expected) which had a generous amount of eggs in them. Hopefully they are just moving around and wont stick around to long.

 

[NRD]

I was back there this week and can confirm there are two "critter access" areas to this hole showing signs of scat containing hard material like crayfish shell and fish bone. I didn't make an intense study of it. I'll bet the low water has made good times for the predators.

As to the fishing, I was skunked again. The fish were rising from 3 till 6, but best between 3 and 4. I was learning to cast an 18' leader. Not as hard as I expected, but I couldn't roll roll cast it with the line I was using. There were very small white flies in the air, and my only take came on a size 18 or 20 white fly. Didn't hook up. How do the fish know when your concentration is slipping?

 

[jrcll]

do you by chance have a net seine to go over your net , thats helped me many times as to see what was on the water

 

[discomidge]

If it helps, over the past month or so I've seen a lot of what the OP was referencing in the C&R on Penns - fish aggressively eating/jumping fully out of the water but ignoring most of my flies. I've thrown the kitchen sink at them and haven't cracked it exactly, but I've caught plenty of fish on small flying ants, a variety of slates (both emergers and dries), sparkle/compara duns, and on dry dropper rigs. Good drifts and 6 or 7x tippet with long *** leaders have been key, as has getting the fly choice right early on. I've definitely put down lots of fish with stupid fly choices. What's fun is that no one pattern has worked for all the fish in a given evening. Classic Penns stuff.

In general, I've also seen lots of this behavior without seeing any bugs in the air or on the water. My first thought was caddis cuz that's what everyone says, but I have yet to get one on a caddis pupa. There are definitely some cahills around too and those normally produce for me, but nothing so far this fall. Go figure.