Where is the skygazer?

For a week skygazer is absent on its regular habitats, in deep holes near cliffs and below the islands. In the morning one does not hear and see the wakes of the predators; the river looks empty. Catfish and Mongolian redfin are still feeding, but the most numerous predator of the river, skygazer, is not visible.

The first skygazer wakes at the sunset Tired after a long fishing day, I was sitting near the tent and watching the sunset. When the sun is close to the horizon, I see big insects flying close to the water surface. This is our biggest mayfly - Ephemera orientalis. It has 2 cm long body and very long “tails”.

As usually, this mayfly is not “dancing” over the water, but skimming the surface, leaving a slight wake.
The insects were hatching not at the main river channel with strong current, but in the slow, wide side-channel with silty bottom. Every minute I could see more and more mayflies.

When the sun was touching the water, some fish has started to come up to the surface of this slow channel. I jumped into the boat and went to check it out. These were the long-awaited skygazers! More and more fish were rising to the mayflies. Weaker wakes belonged to the smaller predator – lookup. The fly should be dry, bushy and not too small. I was using size 6 and even size 4.

It is big fun catching such fish with wt 5 rod

This is lookup – a small and rather secretive Amur predator belonging to the Carps