A "Living" Stream in the City

I fished a little not-so-backwoods wild trout stream today. Casting flies to wild browns right behind a car wash is a bit of a trip, made weirder by the fact that this stream clearly has a healthier trout population than my home river currently does despite being burdened by hot parking lot runoff, littering, chemical leaks, and just being the furthest thing from what a trout stream is generally depicted as. But there it is... and there are trout in it. I call this a living stream because in some sections it is working through a deep sediment and gravel bed that was once the bottom of a marshy pond. I have watched the stream in this section change dramatically in the few months I have visited it. Pools have formed and filled in, cut banks and slowly been eaten away, trees and whole massive chunks of earth have fallen into the stream. Water is an unstoppable force, and humanities many attempts to stop it have proven this... we have fought the battle and lost in many cases. Rivers like this one are ever changing in a very clear and visible on the short-term manor. Thus, "living".

Anyway, this is the junky stinky gross pool where I took my first casts:

And that is where, inexplicably, the biggest fish of the day came up and absolutely walloped the sz. 20 midge pupa I had on. 

So that made it a lot easier to justify hanging around a place where drug paraphernalia is an expected part of the environment. The day got even cooler from there.

After catching a variety of non-salmonid fish I threw my little Sexy Walt's in front of a log and felt a little tap. I set the hook and was rather shocked when I landed a little native brookie! A wild brook trout less than a mile from down town *****. Yeah, I'm not telling you where I caught these fish, not that it's a particularly glamorous location or anything. Go find a damn WTMA. 

Shortly after that awesome discovery I found the weirdest thing I've found in this watershed to date: 

Yup, that's a pile of cleaned and discarded sea robins and one skate, presumably not cleaned. I find this a lot around popular bottom fishing spots along the shore... but I was not ANYWHERE near salt water. Like, further than I am when I'm at home and I live about 40 minutes from the shoreline. Yup. 

So, back to catching fish that will hopefully never get discarded in the parking lot. 

These beautiful trout like being under cut banks in this stream. It really is amazing how far out they'll come to grab a meal though. The fish above cam 3ft out to grab the Ausable Ugly and tried to go right back in, which is what they all do. It makes the takes that much more jarring. There's no mistaking them.

 finished up my day after loosing a few solid fish and literally running out of river to fish. It's cool to see fish thriving in the urban jungle, but it's really only a matter of time. A stream like this won't last forever. I'll have to enjoy it while it's here.