Almost Like the Good Ol' Days

I've been devoting a fair amount of time to my home river of late, especially because it has rebounded exceptionally well after the 2015-2016 drought and is fishing almost as well as it did at in the first two years of this decade. There aren't as many really large wild fish and the brookie population isn't as good as it once was, but it is once again possible to catch a ton of fish in shorter stretches of water, a lot of them being nice wild browns.

On Monday I made a change from my normal timing of a visit here, starting mid afternoon instead of mid morning, and fishing until after sunset. I started out with a few fresh and holdover rainbows. There were hendrickson spinners in the air and on the water, but here there aren't long, slow pools for the spent flies to float, they drown and sink very quickly, so I fish a spinner fall with soft hackled nymphs.

The pocket next to this rock had never produced a trout for me, not once.  Until this trip. The fish wa small but lovely and a good sign for the future.

The browns did a good job of getting off at my feet, so along with the dozen or so that I had no intention of photographing there were another 5 or 6 that would have been great to have photos of, including a 12 inch male that was very colored up.

The water has warmed to the point that the trout are no longer completely pool oriented, so fishing some of the fastest, choppiest water was very productive.

Eventually I came up behind a blue heron and that slowed the bite, so I skipped ahead and changed methods to mousing. I've found that small stream wild trout are much more willing than big river fish to hit a mouse with daylight still remaining. My mission is to weed out the bigger wild fish in the stream and catch them using a method that is not used much in this part of the world, and it nearly panned out tonight as I had more than one jarring strike on the micro mouse. One 16 inch wild brown went fully airborne for the fly, but I failed to connect. The one fish that I did hook came off moments later. So this little game will be revisited soon.