Hopper Fishing on the Missouri River
By: Warren DeMark
It’s 9 pm in the middle of August. The sun just started setting and you haven't started dinner yet. You woke up at 5:30 am today to hit the Trico hatch and stayed on the water for way too long. You had the time of your life squinting at size 20 bugs all day and repairing 5x leaders. A couple of Missouri bruisers were fooled in the midst of the hatch, and lots of fly line was seen leaving your reel when they went on their screaming runs. It was a successful day, as is any day you can fool some trout into sticking their noses out of their aquatic home into our warmer, dryer domain. But you’re tired and dehydrated now, and if you wake up tomorrow at the break of dawn, there may not be enough coffee in the world to prevent you from taking a nap in the river. If only there was a way to wake up at noon and catch fish on size 4 dry flies. Enter Grasshoppers.
Timing
Hopper fishing is my personal favorite type of dry fly fishing. It’s visual, it’s aggressive, and it’s user friendly, and it can be downright effective under the right conditions. The timing of our hopper season deviates slightly each year, but it is usually from late July all the way until the end of September during a warmer year. In the 2023 season we caught fish on hoppers in the first week of October, so that shows how long the hatch can stay around. When it comes to the time of day, later afternoons are the best time to fish with the big bugs. This provides a type of dry fly synergy for the month of August, as we will usually fish for pods of Trico risers in the morning, and switch to hoppers after lunch. August is one of the best times of the year on the Missouri if you are purely interested in throwing dries.
Why Hoppers
I have lots of opinions when it comes to hopper fishing on the Mo’. For the last couple of years, I've focused heavily on just throwing hoppers in August, and ignoring other fishing approaches that may be slightly more fruitful during the month. In short, I have thrown hoppers a lot when I probably should have waved the white flag and opted for a bobber and a couple nymphs. Don’t get me wrong, I love nymphing and spend lots of time pondering about the subsurface environment where fish spend 90 percent of their time eating. But there's just something about a 20-inch trout obliterating a hopper that scratches an itch that a fish caught on a nymph can’t. Hopper fishing also allows you to target a more specific fish. We catch a much higher ratio of Brown Trout when throwing terrestrials. The average fish is also bigger when throwing hoppers. You don’t always catch as many fish compared to other approaches, but you always have a chance at a big brown hopper fishing. The biggest fish I had in my boat last season was a 26-inch Brown caught on a hopper in September. It's also a much more unique dry fly approach as you can twitch, strip, and pop hoppers to trigger eats, while most other approaches require a strict dead drift.
Hopper Activity
When people first think of hopper fishing, they think of grassy banks with deep undercuts. Your mind wanders to finessing a big bug up under the bank where a large brown is lurking. While this approach works in lots of fisheries, it is not the best way to target Missouri hopper eaters. There are tons of hoppers on the land that surrounds the Missouri in the summer, but not all of them live right on the bank next to the water. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t end up in the water. When the temperature warms up to the high 80’s and 90’s in the afternoon, the grasshoppers get much more active and begin flying around more consistently than they do at lower temperatures. This increase in activity coincides with another daily Missouri river trend: Howling afternoon winds. High winds and active grasshoppers causes mayhem in the right areas. This activity doesn’t lead to hoppers landing right up next to the bank. I've seen bugs throw all the way into the middle of the river, 50 yards from the bank. I'm explaining this activity to get to one conclusion. You need to throw your bug where fish are looking up, not where you think hoppers should be. Target shallow gravel bars and buckets that usually hold fish. Throw a cast in the middle of the river sometimes, mix it up. Being creative in your approach can result in a lot more action in the long run.
Approach
Your mindset needs to change when you start fishing hoppers. You can’t expect a fish every cast. Grasshoppers are terrestrials, which means living on or in the ground/non-aquatic. Most fish don’t see hoppers as often as their other food sources, so you need to be patient and wait for the fish that have seen hoppers before. The best way to find these fish is to look at the bank, not the water. You are looking for hopper habitat, which usually means lots of grass to eat. Banks with tall grass that goes right to the water are prime real estate for hopper eaters. Lots of shrubs on a steep bank also lead to lots of hoppers hitting the water. An environment that is also conducive to good hopper fishing is railroads that run next to the river. The rocky surface heats up a lot faster than grassy banks, and you will often hear hoppers clicking aggressively when you float by these structures. All it takes is one gust of wind to knock all of these active bugs into the water and trigger an eat.
One mistake I see people make when terrestrial fishing is casting too often. The Missouri has fish everywhere, and the more time spent casting is less time the fish have to eat your fly. Once you lay a cast on a good line, let it drift. If you're in an area with fish, don’t recast to another area with fish. Trust your first cast. If you have had a long drift with no action, give the fly a small twitch. When hoppers first land on the water, they will usually kick their legs and move a couple inches in one direction and turn over. To accomplish this, quickly jig you rod upwards to ever so slightly turn your fly on the water. You don't want to gurgle it like it's a popper, and you don’t want to skate it like a crane fly. You just want to make the fly kick on the water. Sometimes an aggressive strip will work, but I usually opt for a light twitch once or twice, just to gain the fish's attention. Most eats are on a dead drift, but mixing up approaches is a positive if the fishing gets stale.
Planning a Trip
The hopper fishing on the Mo’ is special, and it's an experience more anglers need to experience. DIY is possible, but difficult. Hopper fishing is much more effective out of a boat compared to wading as you can cover a lot more ground. The Missouri is also a large river with a much different aquatic environment than other more traditional trout streams. This can make it daunting for a first timer, so it truly is a river that is best fished with a guide. Contact us about August and September dates if you are looking to experience world class terrestrial fishing.