A Banner Day

Looking back, I'm pretty confident that today is the best day I've ever had on my home water in January  or February. I've had some good fish catches in mid winter before, but never any sort of numbers. All told today wasn't too impressive, I caught 20 brown trout and salmon parr. I've caught twice and even three times that number on better days in April and early December. I didn't break the ten inch mark either, though I did see a few bigger fish. But it was good to go out and fish hard and catch a good number of fish. Even if the biggest trout in this river was 5 inches I'd keep fishing it. I used euro nymphing techniques and covered water more carefully than I did the last time I came out here. I fished a two fly rig, in such a small river anything more would be too much of a hassle. The hot flies of the day were a black and pink Perdigon and a Sexy Walt's with a pink tag and hot head. Neither one caught more fish than the other, but when a green ice dub nymph or frenchie was the bottom dropper only the perdigon got grabbed. I usually use a line sighter but the takes were really subtle the last time I fished there and I got fed up with how hard it was to see pink line in the shade, so I opted for little knots of ultra chenille, two orange and one chartreuse, and it worked like a charm. I could see the takes much quicker and had a much better hook up ration, 20/25.

The first fish that I'd call decent was particularly colorful, and came from a pool that is ussually really good but was oddly unproductive all through 2016. I was glad to get him there.

The buttery, gorgeous brown bellow was by far the nicest fish of the day. Catching trout like this out of a stream that I love as much as any of my family and friends makes me extremely happy. I would give an arm and a leg to save this stream for eternity, I really would.