The Little Truckee saw another bump in flows this week, sitting at 480 CFS today. This is tough fishing at these rates, there will still be a select few good fishable runs though, so think about the typical slow, deep or wide sections of this river and focus on those if heading out here. Most of the fish have finished up spawn now, and the post-spawn bite is just starting up. The use of large flies with the high water will be a nice advantage of fishing here right now, anglers are having success on stoneflies, worms and eggs paired with some flashy size 18 mayfly imitations like perdigons and rainbow warriors. Streamer fishing will also be a really fun technique with these releases and a good way to quickly cover water and find the more aggressive fish. 

As mentioned above, there is talk that the water out of stampede will be dropped in the coming months for quite a while as the work on the dam, so there is a good possibility that the LT may become unfishable this summer. This may explain why they are releasing so much water out of Stampede right now, knowing that they need to create room for storage or maybe have the lake at a certain level to work on the dam. While this is definitely an unfortunate prospect, we are very fortunate to have Boca Reservoir for these fish to be able to move down to, without this it could very well mess the fishery up as we know it. This potential change in flow regime will certainly keep us on our toes this year and it could not only change the LT, it could also change the two reservoirs and the Truckee. There’s a lot of unknowns with this project, or that it will even happen at all. Stay tuned!