11 hours

There are some things some anglers just aren't able or willing to do. Fishing from 9:55 p.m. until 9:00 a.m. the next morning is one of those things. Some anglers don't have the drive. Some don't have the time. Some can't because of work or family or both. Some just don't want to.
I can do that kind of thing right now, and I probably won't be able to forever. And I sure as hell have the drive. So if the bite seems like it could be on, I'll be out there looking for it.

On Friday night I got out on my part time home water well after dark. It was cloudy, foggy, and warm, and a few showers passed through now and then. I poked around a tributary on the way down with nothing to show for it, but as soon as I got to the stretch of the main stem I expected action in I was getting takes on mice. Some were clearly quite small fish, clearly the kind that could barely fit the fly in their mouths. But in no time at all I hooked into a decent fish in a boiling back eddy. It went absolutely ballistic, spending much more time out of the water than in. It turned out to be a holdover rainbow of about 17" with a serious paddle on it. A good enough start. Pushing on, I found that it was the swirling pockets and eddies that produced the most takes rather than the pools, though I would get one or two fish out of each really good pool. The smaller pockets though seemed to have a bunch of fish in them rather than just one or two, which was strange.

The fourth fish of the night, also the fourth rainbow, was a crazy looking hunchback fish, from now on only to be called The Hunchbow of Mouster Dame. Even though I catch a lot of bows on mice during the day, it is unusual for them to make up the bulk of the catch at night, especially in a river with a fair population of wild browns. As if to ease my confusion, I promptly started catching small wild browns. I got through at least 6 of them, all tiny. The a brookie found the fly and I had a mouse slam.

Cool.

I pushed upstream, sticking to the mouse just because it was working really well, but couldn't pull a big brown. I thought I had for a little but it turned out to be another mid-teens rainbow. Then I hit a dead zone for a little while, before hitting a literal wall. I switch to a black Heifer Groomer and turned around. It was now 2:30. The Heifer did just as well as the mouse but in different places. It worked better in the pools.

Killer Carabou in the mouth.

I had basically stopped photographing fish on the way down because it was all just old news. You don't need to see a bunch of stockers, and they didn't need the extra handling time. But just before dawn the powers that be decided I was going to loose my Heifer Groomer to a beaver. I've hooked beavers before, but this time was extra special. It wasn't very big, and my leader seemed unwilling to give. I almost caught the damn thing. Eventually it was my nail not that gave. I getting back to some water where I had missed a few fish early on, so I tied a new leader and a mouse back on. With the light of a new day awakening, I caught three more fish on the mouse, all wild browns.

My plan had been to fish back up the tributary I had started on with streamers, and I did. I've fished this stream for 3 years and not once caught a trout, though I spooked one there last spring and moved a few this winter. Had it not been for moving those few fish I wouldn't have been so keen to fish it. In fact, if it weren't for a good sucker run I'd have stopped fishing it after the first year. Well, something strange happened. After moving a half dozen sizable fish with streamers far to big for them I knew something was afoot. A new leader and an Ausable Ugly and 30 wild brown trout later I was thoroughly confused.

Most of the fish were pint sized yearlings, but they weren't all young fish. I lost a 15 incher, in fact. Sensing that high water was at least part of the answer for this sudden appearance of hundreds of wild trout, I went up an even smaller tributary that I fished just two weeks ago, and I promise there weren't any trout in it then. Well....

High water does strange things. That's all I can say, really.

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