High And Dirty Multispecies Nymphing

 One day this March, I bounced spot to spot on my way home from Rhode Island. I was mostly hitting new streams and looking for wild trout, but I was having a pretty tough day. I got some stocked trout at one spot, and a couple brookies in one stream I'd fished once before, but it was a struggle to get anything substantial. Then it started raining and I headed to what would be my final stop of the day. It was an upriver portion of a stream I fish a lot, but a part of it I'd never once made a cast in. Before Neil Hagstrom retired from DEEP he had recommended it to me, saying it had a good number of wild browns. 

The day had started out cloudy but by the time I got to this stream it was raining and had been for a little while. The water was severely discolored; I was going to try anyway. I tied on a heavy size 10 Ausable Ugly and began to fish. For a while, I was unsuccessful. Then I thought I had a grab but wasn't quite sure. It definitely felt like one. A few runs down I caught a fish, a wild brown. That bolstered my confidence massively. I suddenly felt this might become a productive evening. 

That fish was right along a seam where the main current of the stream met some chocolate milk colored water coming out of a drain. This is classic brown trout behavior during this sort of storm runoff. Mud lines are a key focus to a lot of my rainy day river fishing, regardless of species. Brown trout in particular though gravitate to them. As I continued downriver and the muddy water from the pipe mixed with the ever muddier water of the stream (it was still raining), it began to look un-fishable. But I don't shy away from stained water as easily as some anglers might. I was fully ready to keep fishing knowing I could well get some high caliber fish in conditions like this. 

It took a little while to get another, but that ended up being a decent fallfish. I then proceeded to catch 8 more fallfish and a brown out of the same seam before continuing downstream. I got a couple more fallfish downriver but didn't find another spot at all that productive so I hit it again on the way back up and got two more fallfish and a large white sucker. 

Those fish alone made it a pretty good bite. That whole pile of fish was stacked up towards the tailout of a very nice, defined bend run. They were in a slack behind a log. It was a classic setup. But to sweeten the pot even more, when I got back to the first spot I'd fished when I had arrived, I got a very hot 14 inch brown there. This fish was gorgeous and spent an awful lot of the fight airborne. 

This was the perfect example of a day that could have ended up being very unproductive, but wasn't entirely because it started to rain. I got soaked, smelled musty for the rest of the evening, and definitely wished I had put all of my electronics in a plastic bag, but it seemed like a pretty good use of my time. I never ignore nasty weather. 

Until next time, 

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

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Edited by Cheyenne Terrien