The Farthest Thing from False Albacore

I was supposed to join Mark Philippe and Phil Sheffield for some albie action yesterday. My recovering body decided otherwise without my consent. I woke up 45 minutes late after sleeping through 30 minutes worth of alarm clock and 15 more of Pip being a goober. I called Mark and apologized and promptly passed out again for close to an hour. I was rather pissed at myself but eventually I stopped whining and went fishing. I decided to chase some trout.

I started at my home river, which was low but freezing cold. I can tell when I'm not going to catch much there and today was going to be that kind of day, so I fished a handful of deeper pools before moving on. I fished a small dark nymph using the strip-tease method and stuck a holdover socked in the spring. Not why I fish this river at all but I'll take it.

Then Plan B was enacted. I went to explore some new water that had some wild brook trout potential. The first stream was very pretty but I came up empty handed in the char department.

The second stream was less than pretty but it was clear from my first glance into this culvert pool that native char were indeed present, including a few monsters in the 12 inch range! It took me a little while to get the pattern nailed down but eventually a leadwing coachman strip-teased some brookies into eating.

I'm not sure why, but these fish were some of the least colorful wild brook trout I've ever come across. That last guy was clearly in his pre-spawn phase, he had a hump back, black on the belly, and his body was thinner and taller than a brookie that isn't getting ready to spawn, yet he lacked the reds and purples I see in most pre spawn males. I wonder why that is?

I finished up on a river that tends to hold fish over very well but doesn't often produce wild fish. I caught one rainbow, and, surprise of the day, a chain pickerel! On a Hare's Ear SH! Take a peek at the hook location if you want to know the only way to land a pickerel of any size on 6x.

Well, that was all pretty much the opposite of fishing from a boat for 40mph pelagic tunoids, but fish are fish and if my rod is bent and my feet are in or near the water I'm smiling like a butcher's dog. Today, I didn't sleep in, and those tunoids gave me a second chance. But for that, my friends, you will have to wait.