May 12, 2014 Report

 

Get out of the practice of visiting the good places out there, you run the risk of diminishing your praise of them.  Here making a distinction between club membership and genuine praise and at least partial understanding.  Can’t slip on this need; it must be treated like any other common human want.  It’d be pretty easy to slip too, given the various draws on time.  But plain and simple just treat it like a thread of life; treat it like anything else; and maybe figure that if there does exist such a thing as a sin, neglecting the world in which we live would be one.  Confined space training is not our game.  A person in a box preaching about good and evil, sins and not, is not a person to whom I give much weight.  Nor do I heed the person who might characterize stalking the wild asparagus or hunting down meat eating fishes or steaming nettles at streamside as neglecting one’s duty to family and community.  One is sometimes even required to strike a rebuttal against such accusations.  There are many, many places painted perfectly by all forces of nature - holy, natural and otherwise - to which I attempt to pay proper appreciation and maybe craft some sort of muddled attribution and sometimes try to understand.  There’s  a long list; another list of those unseen that I desire to visit; that used to be in chalk written on a black wall in my basement.  Can’t get to them all though; wrath of the math; but do get to some.  On this particular day a couple things came together to spark me: (1) my wife suggested five brown trout ought to be captured for dinner, a directive that I very much appreciated and admired; told her as much; this indicated to me that she has some dimensions of understanding of me and she knew that asking me to forgo spreadsheets in favor of a hunt would present an opening to what would surely become a highlight of my calendar month May 2014; like I said, I told her as much, (2) on my list was a place that I did not get to last year; place where I heard a feline scream two years ago and a place in which I sat on a stump and my actions moved in front of my thoughts of the actions.  Good water; special place.  Wonderful spring flood plain floor.  Only had about four hours; some notes below.

 

 

Not sure how you could beat this scene.

As for the fishing notes: started out just hotter than hell.  Drove over turbid water and found this to be mint condition.  A friend said try a white bugger.  Have none, but applied a blue/white clouser.  Went exactly 4/11 at this first piece of water.  Could have had more action but moved on.  Missed a lot of fish because (1) not the best hook gap, (2) moderate difficulty casting right upstream and stripping straight back to me; sometimes lost contact with streamer.  I really enjoyed this fishing. 

Tied these for north shore application.

Around noon some risers came on.  There were caddis and mayflies in the air but not in big numbers.  Right where those two current lines come together there were some sippers.  Sometimes I think big when it comes to sippers; bigger fish maybe.  First: sip, miss.  Few bad casts; few very bad casts.  Then: sip, connection.  Nice fish; not huge though.  The sipping head was dramatic but fish was not huge.

This fish died just ten feet away from its hold which was in a run along a vertical soil bank.  My speculation is that this explains the stomach full of earth worms; wondering if they were simply washed in from their black holes one after another.  The other note is the lamprey pictured.  Have not seen this in a trout stomach before.  It was approximately six inches long.  I have tried to piece together a visual sequence in which this 12" BNT located, attacked and ate the lamprey.  Tricky to piece together; interesting.

BNT.  All said and done I suppose maybe 18-20 fish captured by various means: streamers, dries, nymphs.  No really big specimens.

Three beauty shots starting here.  Stunning to see these fish in their water, even if in somewhat atypical state.

Water like this is loaded with fish.  Moderately fast, broken, strewn with boulders.  Fish it at 90 degree or slightly angling upstream.  Literally fish everywhere; almost every single cast drew a flash or a connection.

Had a great desire to see the forest floor, the flood plain.

SE MN.