Caddis, Caddis, EVERYWHERE!

While sitting in class this past Tuesday evening, (trying not to fall asleep), I was trying to decide where I was going to go fishing yesterday. I'm not a mathematician, but I was able to figure out that sixty degree weather plus no generation, added up to me needing to be on the Toccoa River Wednesday morning. After making a few phone calls and rounding up a group at the last minute, I scurried home to get all of my things together for the next day. 5 o'clock came early the next morning after getting only 4 hours of sleep, but I kept telling myself, "The first boat down the river catches all the fish." With warm weather coming in, and the anticipation of caddis hatching, I was more than ready to get the boat in the water. Chuck, Danny Hatcher, Lamar Allen, and I met at Tammen Park just as the sun came up, slid the boats in, and put our stuff together as quickly as we could. We tore out downstream, and were catching a few fish on some nymph rigs, but could see some small bugs flying with a few fish rising to them. I wasn't really paying a lot of attention to the very few fish that were rising, but this would all change very soon. About noon, black caddis began fly in huge swarms, and my attention was quickly drawn towards them. I hadn't seen a hatch like this in probably 3 or 4 years, it was HUGE! If I had to compare it to something, it was a lot like a duck migration through Stuttgart Arkansas, possibly even better. We quickly picked up the dry dropper rods that we already had rigged and started fishing. We were catching a lot of fish on the dropper, until the fish finally realized that they were suppose to eat all of those things flying around. As we floated on downstream, it seemed as if everywhere you thought that there should be a fish, there was. At one point, I counted 7 cast that I had 7 rises on. It took us a while, but we finally achieved what we came to do. Halfway into the trip, Danny Hatcher hooked and caught this beautiful male rainbow on 6x tippet. He had been missing a few fish, and I was giving him a pretty hard time, but he managed to hit the nail on the head when this guy decided to bite.