Truckee River Fishing Report & Forecast

The entire Truckee river is fishing well right now, from Highway 89 all the way down through Reno! With minimal releases out of Lake Tahoe still, the uppermost sections of the Truckee will be a bit low and slow, but by the time you get down past the resorts, you will start to see much more good fishable water. Up here the opportunities for dry fly or dry dropper fishing have been good due to its clarity, reasonable flows and high concentrations of carpenter ants and yellow sallies. In fact those two bugs can be found pretty much everywhere on the river right now! Once you start to get east of Truckee, you will start to see higher numbers of PMDs, and after entering the Nevada side, the caddis really start up. We will see these hatches make their ways upstream as the season progresses and water temps rise along the upper river.

As of today we are seeing the water temps at the Sparks gauging station peak around 62 degrees, and at the Farad gauging station they are at 57. Once we begin to see temps hit 68 in Reno, we ask that anglers be aware of fishing for trout in the afternoons and limit your fishing to the morning hours. This will likely still be a few weeks away if air temperatures aren’t too bad. These warmer water temps have made the fish sit almost exclusively in “fast” water. This doesn't mean the fastest stuff in the middle of the river, but maybe the faster moving riffles on the edges of the top of a run, or where there is a good amount of bubbly water, but is deep enough to have a soft pocket of water for the fish to hold in. When fishing this water type the use of heavy weighted flies and split shot become even more necessary. If you ain’t snagging (the bottom), you ain’t bragging.

With the decreased visibility in the Nevada section, the use of streamers this time of year can be a lot of fun and a great way to find some of the bigger fish. The water is still much clearer here on the California side, we have still been doing best on small to medium sized nymphs imitating yellow sallies, pmd’s, green drakes and caddis. These paired with a stonefly have been doing great when fishing pocket water and riffles. As the temps rise, the morning fishing has been a bit better than the afternoon, but the potential for some great caddis dry fly fishing at dusk has been keeping some anglers on the river well after dinner time.

Little Truckee River Fishing Report & Forecast

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!