California's Upper Kern is fishing the way the Kern River Valley faithful want it to in early May, and Guy Jeans of the Kern River Fly Shop has loaded up the new May 2026 report with the flow numbers, fly choices and on-water moments to back it up.
The video opens with Jeans hand-fighting a chunky rainbow in the shallows after a swung streamer eats. "That looks like a 18 to 20 in fish right here," he calls. "Oh, he busted me off. That's what you get when you don't have a net."
Flow conditions are the headline. "This is April uh in 2026 and you can fish the upper Kern River right now," Jeans tells viewers. "It's actually down to about 900 and then up above the powerhouse it's even lower. So it's like around the 400 level. So you got 15 mi of 400 and then down below into town it's about 900 to a thousand. It's just kind of fluctuating in that zone."
For anglers willing to think wider than the river, he flags the lake and the creeks. "You also can fish the lake for bass and crappie which is amazing. You guys got to give that a try. Or you can go up into the creeks and we have hundreds of miles of creeks to explore where you can catch golden trout, brown trout, golden rainbow hybrids, that sort of thing."
The technique playbook covers four working programs. The first is a streamer-on-the-swing setup that Jeans rigs with a sinking leader, three feet of 2x tippet, two streamers and a tag dropper to keep the upper fly drifting freely. "I'm going to cast into the current here, let my fly swing around, and then strip them back upstream um kind of in the eddy line and uh see if a fish will pick it up," he explains. The 10-foot 6-weight Sage Arrow handles the work. "It picks a line up off the water. It's 10 ft. And it casts amazing."
A second swing fish lands within minutes. "That was on the swing. He was down a little ways. God, I love this Sage Arrow. That's a nice fish, man... 15 16 inches for sure. He's fired up."
For anglers who want to stay tight to the bottom, Jeans walks through dry-dropper, double-dropper, indicator nymphing and Euro-style nymphing. "You could straight nymph, Euro nymph. Use an indicator and put some split shot on, get your flies down, or use heavily weighted flies. So those are some of the techniques that you can use. They are all working."
Fly choices land squarely in classic Kern territory. Jeans names yellow sallies, golden and brown stoneflies, hare's-ear soft-hackle jig nymphs, the psycho mayfly and a Euro Iris in size 10 to 12. He shows three streamer winners on camera: a flashy Crelex, an olive bugger and a tailed pattern called the Jawbreaker.
Dana, the shop's resident hatch reader, hands viewers the bug intel. "I've been seeing some hatches uh just some smaller stonefly exoskeletons about size 10 and 12. Also I've been seeing some catis coming off," she says. "Now the water below the Fairview Dam is under 300 CFS or so. So very manageable and a good place to fish. Some places you can even get halfway into the river and fish that river right side."
For visiting anglers, the Kern's May setup is one of the more flexible the Sierras offer right now. With a sub-300 CFS tailwater at Fairview, a 900 to 1000 CFS in-town run and the upper river at a wadeable 400, the system is fishable from beginner-friendly walks to streamer hunts for surface-eaters. The water is a touch stained, the days are warming and the early caddis are coming off. May 2026, in Jeans' read, is shaping up to be one of those rare windows where every technique on the rack is in play.