MIAC Trout Fishing

Two SJU graduates working a good corner.

First fish of the day for a guy who was out for the second time in his life.  Slow water, streamer, nice strike and nice fish.

There was moderate trepidation leading up to this event.  We targeted a weekday to avoid other anglers.  But this enduring moisture has made interpretation of gauges and precip totals tough.  I surveyed pretty intensely but couldn't arrive at certainty and could find no one to report definitively on this water.  Day before I'd been to a big water and a small water.  The former was shot through and the latter was dead clear.  This one was in the middle.  So approaching it represented a culmination of sorts...   and we found it stone clear.  At that point, we knew it was simply going through the motions (which would be fluid and beautiful) en route to 50-100 fish.

The only native specie we caught on this outing.

It was largely a nymphing day but streamers were in play too.  There was half an hour of dry fly insanity but we couldn't figure it...     fish were porpoising but couldn't get the right presentation.  I believe this had to do with poor skittering.  There were large mayflies and craneflies on the water but the fish laughed at dead drifts.  Every fly I threw out there I knew instantly...   would not be eaten.  It didn't take much to switch back to nymphs and get back to it.

We did not catch 100 fish but I believe we touched around 50.  And that was fishing very casually, maybe 50-60% effort.

This guy offered some good tips on patterns that I don't normally use; example: lighter colored streams.  Never strikes me to try anything like that but it worked on this outing.  As for the water behind him...    it was a deep dark dungeon.  We could have camped there and caught fish all day.  But it was absolutely necessary to put ~7 feet below an indicator and fish with two beads and splitshot.  It seemed like an impossibly slow drift...   but short mends to keep in the current provided the required twitches of the flies...   which brought strikes.  It was a classic definition of clockwork.  We were limited at this hole only by the far bound of the day...   we had to turn around and head out.  Dozen plus fish in maybe half an hour; lost quite a few too, presumably due to tough hook set scenario with that much distance below indicator.  The key here was...      those fish were unawares.  Down there in the bottom, they couldn't see us and were not getting alarmed when a teammate would twist off into the light above.  Visualizing those nymphs on that drift...   very deep...  very nice.  The best moment of this day came after handing the new fly fisherman the 2 wt Sage...    watching him flip the nymph rig perfectly into the slow current...    mend it as needed...   twitch the flies...   see the subtle indicator hint...   and put the hammer down.  Bowed rod and pretty good smile.

Last of the day we split up and went hunting for bigger fish.  At one really nice configuration a dark streamer brought a fish ~14" to hand.  Next cast was to the little cushion just up of that fish...    as soon as I started stripping back a trout trucked the streamer and simply sheared or broke it off on impact.  No one knows.  Good mystery.  Earlier in the day a very, very large fish followed a streamer to my feet and folded on it as I picked it up...   no connection.  There would be no monsters to hand this day.

Three pics constituting a tribute to Salmo trutta.  The spots never get old.