February 2014 Captions

 

It's cold and frozen.  We don't have the worst of it even, but our SE MN uplands have a tundra feel right now.  Longest streak of no eggs we've ever seen at our place.  Conserving energy.  This picture about 20 minutes away.  Wouldn't make one think of fishing.  But again the uplands are frozen and that does not include their ancient dendrites of water that spill from rock walls and come up through streambeds.  The trout streams are the warm refuges in this landscape now.

Fished from around noon to maybe 1430 the other day.  This time of year usually shows one hold-over outing looking ahead to March.  The January outing is in the books; the hard nymphing was done then.  More relaxed schedule and approach.  In fact I didn't even have the drive to make it to the big hole.  I picked up 8-10 fish in a series of four holes and turned around.  Snow deeper.  Colder.  Fishing slower.  But they still answered to scuds and standard approach.  My feet got cold because I have a habit of standing in one place and drifting away until I get the drift right.  I like the S-curve on this fish.

Being that I turned around a bit short, I had a few extra minutes to look at water closer to the road.  Been many years since I had seen it, I think.  I was a little weary after birddog focus on the nymphing so I did something more relaxing: employed a streamer.  More casting, longer distances, steady retrieve, thoughtless fishing really.  In fact one could argue that you should not think about your streamer at all or watch it all.  We have a lot of good streamer water that begs for attention; like that pictured here.  Slower water, especially with boulders in the deep green and gray.

A while back I accidentally and absent-mindedly tied some LOD iterations on some baby little wirey baby pansy hooks.  I didn't realize my error until I had turned out a few.  So I put them in my trout box.  First cast of 2014 brought this fish up from the still in a near-vertical take plane.  It happened that I was watching as the fly got close and thus I was able to see a mouth open and rise.



Suppose now I'll wait a while.  Can't keep any fish and the deep winter jones is shot.  I'm getting good words re new regulations; thinking 2014 could work out really well for any folks who appreciate walking streams and holding fish.