An Intermission: It is Rather Cold

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Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines.

I've been home for a week now. I'm still a little well tanned for January, and I'm still not used to fishing in the cold. Which isn't to say I haven't been fishing. I've been out there, getting cold finger tips and catching a few fish. My first outing back was a foggy one. I saw some brookies. My mission was to get my January dry fly fish, and I stuck steadfast to dries despite absolutely no action with them. It was pretty warm, the air was still, the fog was thick... I am not sure why I couldn't coax a char to rise.

 The next day I just continued my hunt for a dry fly fish. It was colder, windy, and brighter... to my eye a markedly worse winter day to try to coax a salmonid to the surface. I was wrong. I fished for less time, only fished one stream, and I did successfully bring brook trout to the surface. This January is my 48th consecutive month of catching at least one salmonid on a dry fly. 4 years. I do wonder when this run will end. It can't go one forever.

Big parts of the stream I was fishing look like what you see in the photo to the left. Getting through that stuff is a riot. Impatience leads to holes in waders and spooked fish. A good bow and arrow cast is necessary. Persistence even more so. Some of the biggest brook trout in the stream live in sections like this, in the past I'd caught fish in excess of a foot long in here. This time something rather startling showed up. I was swinging a parachute Adams across the tail of a run when a monstrous brook trout appeared, sidled up to the fly, missed, missed again, then didn't miss. I lifted the rod... maybe a little too quickly. The fish turned away violently, taking the fly and leaving me to pick my jaw up off the ground. That fish was every bit of 16 inches.


Upstream, in more hospitable terrain for a bipedal hairless ape, I knelt by a pool and shot my Sturdy's Fancy into a seem downstream and across the pool. A couple seconds into the fly's drift, a snout captured it. I defeated January.

Salvilinus fontinalis

I walked away from that outing with a huge smile on my face. I had pretty much forgotten the huge brookie that had stolen my Adams.

That was the last warm-ish day we've had around here.

I could be out on the ice right now if I were so inclined,
whereas that day there were ponds with enough open water to fish plenty effectively.

 Before shelf ice had started to form I payed a visit to my home river for the first time of 2019. It wasn't great. I caught one rainbow. The air was too cold for my fingers and too cold for taking fish out of the water. Between doing jumping jacks on the bank and cramming my hands in my armpits I made half hearted casts. Had I been fishing with more intent, maybe I wouldn't have lost the biggest living wild brown I've seen in my home river in a few years.

She was on for a few seconds.

She was every bit of 18 inches.

She left me with a limp line, and my jaw once again on the ground.

I went back last night. That big brown was still there. And I was probably still not fishing with enough confidence and intent. She remains unmolested. And I remain in a state of unrest. Loosing the brown just made loosing the brookie sting more.

It is winter. Big fish have a way of appearing suddenly in the winter. And even though I know that they are there, and that this is one of the better seasons to seek out those bigger trout and char, I still never expect to encounter one. And big fish have a way of disappearing just as suddenly and surprisingly as they appear.