Hex Fishing on the Pere Marquette

While hex fishing on the Pere Marquette River, you may encounter your single best dry fly fishing experience! It is, without question, the most intense few hours of hatch fishing I have ever seen. We are not talking about Trico and Midge here; we are talking the B-2 bombers of the Mayfly world. Timing is everything, but patience is a virtue if you are looking to land the BIG BROWNS!! There are several shortcuts that you can use to enhance not only the number of fish you get to catch in a night, but also the overall size of the fish, and it takes a little edge to fool the resident trout of old that have seen more than a couple of hatches. Nightfall and darkness are the triggers for this amazing happening and you had better leave that 4-weight in the truck and grab the 7-weight, because you never know what is going to go “gulp” in the night!

Typically the hex hatch occurs from top to bottom of the river at different times of the early summer. Most often the hatch starts by the third week of June and runs a couple weeks into July, a solid month of massive Mayflies hitting the water nightly. Fishing pressure peaks around the end of June but fishing hex flies, even midday, will get you a fish or two as the bug can and does hatch here and there all day during the magical month of the Hexagenia limbata.

Fishing Hex flies on the Pere Marquette requires special gear – a quality, multi-beam headlamp, (a good lamp will allow you to look up for bugs with a solid beam and be adjustable so you can open the scope to allow for easier walking/wading) safety glasses, bug spray and heavy leader tippets, a heavier rod and a fly box fattened with hex patters you have spent the better part of winter perfecting for this once-a-year extravaganza. Fleece, drinking water, boat, or canoe are all optional but one other thing that is a must is a camera because they should be left where they were landed!!

Catch & Release Practice not only ensures that there will be more fish in the future, but bigger fish too; not only are they able to grow larger after they are put back at 20” or better, but they are also allowed to spawn and pass the Big Fish Gene on to the next generation of young browns that may exceed their parents size. IT IS A WIN WIN SITUATION!!

When the PM Hex Hatch occurs it is an amazing sight you can see little of. You can hear and feel the bugs swarming like locusts around you and if you turn your light on you will be covered with the Giant Mayfly before you can say “Hex Hatch”!! When the biomass of bugs gets so massive, and the spinner flight is so thick it looks like someone painted the water with Hex; sometimes running two Hex Fly Patterns is better then one. It is like two-for-one on the casting end of the equation; the hardest part is that you need to throw a bigger rod and likely a heavier leader to move the two large patterns. It is good and bad in that if you hook smaller fish they won’t battle as great, at the same time if you do hook a “Toad”, you have something to fall back on, that being the beefier end of a 7-wt instead of a soft 4-wt that might break on a two foot caliber fish!!

When you go out to fish after dark, it won’t be to fish that you can catch in the daylight. If you come to fish the Pere Marquette River Hex Hatch, try and be selective in the fish you want to pursue; wait for the Big One to gulp before you stop and spend a good portion of the night trying to get your fly in front of him. If the fish sounds like he is gulping water instead of splashing it, that is a good sign of a wary fish, and a wary fish is often older and, in turn, larger. Big Browns that can be caught on Dry Flies are more than enough reason to put your wading boots on at 9pm instead of 9am, and the Pere Marquette River has plenty of Big Browns that just wait for these buggy nights every year!! Did I forget to mention we catch our Steelhead On Dry Flies during this amazing hatch???? That’s right folks -- Steelhead ON DRIES -- coming to you live from the Pere Marquette River!!

Tommy Lynch