Waiting for the hatch to start

The Wife, Josh and I found ourselves fishing up near Cody this past weekend. We got a couple hours in Saturday afternoon and, after breakfast at Irma's, hit the river pretty hard on Sunday. It was warm and sunny out, with good flows and reasonable clarity. Since we were fishing in town, the crowds were to be expected.

After a short hike up the trail, Josh discovered a handful of cutthroat rising to midges. With a mild case of dry-fly fever, it was on. We quickly caught a handful of fish between us with various dry flies that defied visible detection. It was one of those instances where we were hooking quite a few fish (although only landing a few) while another angler just within sight and earshot upstream was getting skunked--and increasingly agitated with our success.

After hooking or scaring off all the fish in our immediate vicinity, we continued on upstream and came across two fly fishermen fully geared but sitting on the bank. With fish visibly feeding in the top few inches of the water column, these two blokes informed us they were "waiting for the hatch to start." What the?!? There were midges all over the place with decent fish coming up to the surface, or near-surface, and these guys were content waiting for the hatch to start. I moved on and landed a nice rainbow on a stonefly nymph.

Later in the afternoon, it warmed up even more and a sporadic mayfly hatch materialized. We caught fish off and on with midges, blue-winged olives and various nymphs/streamers throughout the day.

All-in-all it was a great day on the water. The Wife got to break in her new 5-weight fly rod and, like last season's first real trip, she got the big fish of the day--this time a nice cutthroat about 16 or 17 inches. Unfortunately, there appears to have been one casualty. Our camera seems to have kicked the bucket.

EDIT: By popular demand, here's a camera-phone shot of The Wife's fish that Josh managed to catch.