A Short Trip, Small Flies, and Hefty Trout

I fished for a few hours this morning with Mike Andrews. It was very cold last night, for late July atleast, and I think it had the fish in a funky mood. It took us a while to actually get any solid hookups. Mike was nymphing, I was fishing dries. He got a lot more takers than I did, no surprise, but for a while they were just mouthing his flies. Bug wise, the menu consisted mainly of small caddis and midges. I was having a hell of a hard time seeing flies that were small enough to even tempt the rising fish, but eventually I watched a fish come up and suck something down where I thought my fly should be. I gave a very light hookset, the fly was one of Mike's tiny foam caddis pupa, and felt the weight of an angry brown trout on the other end. I tend not to use small dries if I don't have to, so it had been a while since I caught a trout this nice on a sz. 20. It feels good, but I'd still rather watch a fish like that wreck a big unweighted streamer.

Mike jumped on board not much longer with a beautiful spunky rainbow that looked and acted wild. I hesitate to call some fish wild, especially with rainbows, but the force was strong with this one and there are more wild trout in this river every year....

There were clearly a bunch of fish in that pool, and I would not have minded staying since I hadn't fished it much in a few years, but it was getting crowded and my legs had begun to beg for warmer water, so we went downriver. 

Good choice? I think so! Mike caught that piggy holdover rainbow on a big pink squirmy worm! Clearly it is eating well. I caught a fish down there too, but that rainbow could have swallowed my brown no problem.

I just love that river, and Mike does too. We could have stayed there all day, but he had things to do. Actually, it probably would have just become a day of dealing with the crowds anyway. But its the early birds that stick the pigs!