Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Solitude




What a day. No one in sight, clear water, many fish. Hiked into LHF, felt like walking into the arms of a familiar lover. The 411: landed 8 or 9 fish, nothing under 11. I missed several others, had a very nice brown on (twice) momentarily, and lost several flies to a wayward tree limb. The most memorable was losing that brown. I had come to a very deep run, had taken a trout from the back end, but then saw another swirl a little farther up. You know how you can see the back of the fish break the water, then the tail rotate over... you can tell its of good size.. I flicked a great cast right up into the overhanging tree, had to break off. Tied on another fly, lost that one too. finally put the fly right in the sweet spot.. gulp!.. I stung him and popped it out of his mouth! Tried again, nothing. Tried a new fly, smaller, gulp again! this time I had him on for about 8 secs.. that's right, I rode that bull for the allotted time, then he popped off... Drat! Fun nonetheless.. what a day!
I'm amazed by how many fish, and good size fish are in this stream. They were starting to stage for spawning, and I spooked out many fish in the riffles.. some quite nice, say, 16" or so.. and for this size stream the number per run or hole is incredible...

1 comment:

The Gov'na said...

Yaaaah boy. Nothing like a good day to get you going. Taken them on top like that in early spring with snow still on the ground is sweet. You should go back in a week or so when the cuts are spawning and I'd bet you'd catch some montster browns on an egg pattern in shallow water, that would be cool.

Love that underwater footage- cracks me up. That's a nice brown, would look good with some music overlay instead of the water noise. You need to get on all fours and get your face down in the water so you can see what you're filming. Keep the fish better in focus!