NEVADA AND THE DISCO MIDGE; EAST WALKER RIVER IS A UNIQUE WINTER FLY-ANGLING DIVERSION.

Byline: BRETT PAULY Angling

However contradictory it sounded, the statement was music to the ears.

``The disco midge was the rock 'n' rollin' fly,'' said Valencia fly-fishing instructor Joe Contaldi, my angling partner on this partly cloudy day along a stretch of the East Walker River in Nevada's Lyon County. ``We caught more fish on that today.''

The fly pattern tied to imitate a bug in its waterborne larval stage was minute and minimal, less than three-eighths of an inch in length. But it had just enough glean, just enough of that '70s flash for which it was named, to catch the eye of the nearly two dozen trout released during our eight hours on the river.

``This is a good day. Getting a dozen fish per person is good,'' said Contaldi. He landed 15 rainbows and browns to 17 inches on this 7-mile publicly owned section of the East Walker in Toiyabe National Forest known as Rosaschi Ranch. Here catch and release is the law and only artificial lures or flies with single, barbless hooks are permitted.

I brought to the shallows seven rainbows from 12 to 16-1/2 inches and a gorgeous 14-inch brown. And the rainbows weren't the skinny, bland stockers that are taken by zealous anglers an hour after being planted; these were fat, big-headed fish with bright, crimson gill plates that had been in the river for quite some time.

But Contaldi's assessment must have been an overstatement; surely a dozen releases was at the top of the fishing scale, and I was feeling quite proud of my accomplishment. But, alas, he had nailed close to 30 trout during a road trip to the lonely river just the weekend before.

Still, we were doing better than some of the other eight or so anglers there.

``The fishing was great; the catching was slow,'' said Glendale's John Gramatky, whose wintertime pilgrimages to the East Walker began in 1963. The suspender midge at his line's end was ``hot mostly everywhere, but it was cold on the East Walker.''

Gramatky hadn't counted on the power of the disco midge. ``I guess I needed some of that Bee Gees magic,'' he said.

Indeed, the disco midge was special.

Like many fly patterns, the history of the disco midge is uncertain, at least in this area. Some think it originated in Colorado or New Mexico, perhaps the Northwest. A fairly recent pattern presumably named after the short-lived music and dance craze of the 1970s, its thin body is accented with plastic foil in light olive, pearl, pink or red and its head is peacock herl.

Not uncommon, the disco midge is stocked in most of the better fly shops. Meant to mimic a midge larvae, it also looks like a tiny worm and is commonly found tied to the tippet in tandem below a San Juan worm pattern that serves to attract trout to the midge. (A San Juan worm can certainly pick up its share of fish, and was the pattern that fooled my 16-1/2-inch rainbow.)

Use of the disco midge in the Eastern Sierra has become more common in recent years, according to Steve Kennedy, owner of the Trout Fitter in Mammoth Lakes.

``Guides kept it quiet for a while, but a couple of years ago the secret got out,'' Kennedy said. ``It's part of the cycle with flies; you want something the fish don't see every weekend.''

And apparently it's a winner on the East Walker in winter, when reduced flows fed from the Bridgeport Reservoir are exceptionally fishable and the resident trout population dine primarily underwater on midges, stoneflies, mayflies and caddisflies in their immature stages.

For Eastern Sierra anglers, the Nevada side of the East Walker is one of the only games in town during winter. Most of the region's California-side trout streams and lakes are closed to angling from November through late April. But for those willing to make the trip, the East Walker can be the offseason answer to a trout addiction and a tremendous warmup to the Eastern Sierra trout opener.

The California and Nevada sides of the East Walker are very different, according to fishery biologists in both states.

``On the California reach of the East Walker, the (Bridgeport Reservoir) dam prevents sediment from coming down and it has a steeper gradient so the river runs faster, meaning spawning gravel and natural reproduction (of trout) is limited,'' said Steve Parmenter, an associate fishery biologist with the Department of Fish and Game in Bishop. Consequently, California has an aggressive stocking program in which 100,000 put-and-grow fingerling brown trout are planted in the East Walker every summer.

While most of the California fish are hatchery browns that struggle to carry over in harsher winters, in Nevada's Rosaschi Ranch most of the trout - about two-thirds browns, one-third rainbows - are wild. That is, they are spawned and hatched in the river and then go on to produce progeny of their, said Pat Sollberger, a fisheries biologist with Nevada Division of Wildlife in Carson City.

Natural reproduction is favorable because the farther the river travels from the dam, additional substrate - and invaluable gravel for spawning - flows in from tributary streams, the biologists said. Furthermore, the gradient of Nevada's East Walker flattens out and slows down, allowing the gravel to stick around longer and accumulate deeper.

Despite the population ratio, Contaldi and I landed four rainbows to every brown.

``What you catch and what's actually out there is two different things,'' Sollberger explained. ``Generally, browns are more wary, and I don't know why, but that changes at different times of the year.''

But the brand of trout matters little in Nevada, where a strange phenomenon from the '70s will lure either species like ``Hot Stuff'' on Donna Summer.

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Photo

PHOTO Valencia's Joe Contaldi landed several beefy trout during a recent trip to the East Walker River of Nevada, including this nice brown.

Brett Pauly/Daily News