January Thaw

If I am to be completely honest... I have skipped quite a number of days when I probably should have fished over the last couple weeks. I know that sounds hilarious too people who actually have a life, but I have the time and instead of sleeping and watching stupid youtube videos I should probably be freezing my ass off and not catching anything. There is only so much time I can spend tying flies in a day before my back says "that's it, you're standing up and walking NOW". I judge that by number of flies rather than minutes and with woolly buggers it seems to start right around three dozen. So today when I had finished two and a half dozen I was done and I went out looking for some, as one of my favorite youtube fisherman William B. Tedrick would say,  feeesh. (Really a cool guy, I highly recommend his videos. They're real, true, workingman's fishing videos.)

There has been a thaw in these parts as of late, so today the streams I fished we ice free. The fish were sluggish but I was still able to find a few. I was relieved to spot two in a stretch of stream that I had thought may have been done in by last summer. Of course it is possible they were fish from farther downstream that had worked their way back up. Regardless, I should have seen more fish than I did in the crystal clear water.

Eventually the Pinkie got eaten well enough that I landed its eater. Just one fish can make a day. The next few days could be even better, especially with more rain tonight into tomorrow. Hopefully I will get to do some real streamer fishing soon.