A Little Bit of Class 1 Exploration

Josh Parsons invited me to fish a class 1 TMA on Monday. That was a pretty easy choice. This stream was one I have done pretty well in previously and have seen the potential for big fish in. It's also just a gorgeous place. Rolling hills, farmland, mixed forest... it's a New Englandy trout stream if there ever was one.

The outing started out with a surprise. Under the bridge, dangling my little sculpin, I hooked up to what I was pretty sure was going to be a big brown. Then I got a good look at it. 

This very not wild rainbow in a Class 1 WTMA is the second I've caught there since November. It's a different fish too, the other was substantially smaller. 

Fortunately I found a real fish not 15 minutes later. 

Kind of a weird think happened. I had my own personal very short bite window. I got two more browns, found some fish rising to extremely tiny midges that I apparently had nothing small enough to imitate (22's didn't work, wet or dry). I did what I hate doing though and pulled a streamer through the risers and had one of the prettiest browns I've ever seen take the fly. 

 A recent, very brief post of mine spoke to how hard it can be to capture what a fish really looks like through photography. My brief encounter with this handsome fish wasn't such a circumstance. 

A little further up I got my third and final wild brown, a long and lean female. Not long after that Josh and I headed downstream, only to find an exceptional lack of action and a stream bed gouged out by this previous year's extremely high water events. A lot of great structure that had been was gone, and apparently a lot of the fish have moved out of that water. It had also clearly been fished a substantial amount too, but I can see there being some potential here for habitat improvement, as long as it doesn't result in problems for the native species of special concern, slimy sculpin.

Though being a little unusual day it was a good one. I got to cover some parts of the stream that I hadn't previously and caught some exceptional fish. I also saw ways in which the stream could be improved to slow erosion and provide better cover for both trout and smaller native fish species. A time goes on I'd like to see some progress made in this watershed.

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