Winter and Early Spring Guiding up date


The onslaught of late fall / early winter storms seems to have passed and the rivers and creeks are settling back to normal and getting on with winter fishing. There is plenty of water, and we are not seeing the low flows of mid winter that we have in previous winters.  With no big storms on the forecast winter hatches and fishing should be consistent for the next few weeks if not months.
The Lower Yuba has been stable for over a week now at 1900cfs and the clarity is perfect with a bit of color. There are a few winter steelhead in the system and with the higher then normal flows more and more should show up over the next 2 months. Skwala Stonefly hatches should start to get going as the weather is suppose to
warm up over the next week and the baetis hatches should get going as well with maybe even a few early march browns. This is a great time of year, as long as the weather stays stable, to swing flies, nymph, and fish dries all in the same day.
The Lower Sacramento River is back to fishable clarity and cranking out its normal big winter fish. I have spent a fair amount of days over the last month on the upper floats on the sac and hooked some of the biggest rainbows of the year. We are
not hooking huge numbers of fish but plenty of action throughout the day with some big fish in the mix. Fishing should remain good over the next few weeks. If we start to get some of that early warm February weather the spring caddis hatches will start up and move into March,which is one of the best months of the year on the Lower Sac.
Butte Creek will remain open until Feb 15 and with any rain the river will jump up again to floatable flows, but for right now the flows are at perfect wade fishing flows. There are good numbers of fish throughout the creek and fishing so far this season has been very good.
Feather River spring steelhead fishing usually gets going in March and if the fall run was any indication of how the spring run will be it should be a great year. Spring is a great time to swing flies on switch rods or light spey rods along with nymphing. I have both Scott and Echo switch and light spey rods for anglers to use if they want to try this style of fishing.
I have raised my rates for 2013 to $425 for a full day and
$325 for a half day and I still have a few winter and early spring dates open:
Jan 20, 21, 26
Feb 2, 3, 9, 16,
March 16, 17, 23, 24, 31

Hogan Brown