With James about to head off to Paris to meet his mother and me about to head off to Colorado to bum around high lakes for three weeks, we took a day off from various preparations to fish STSNBN. I was still smarting over lost behemoths and we figured it would be rounding into its best early summer form. It pretty much was, though thunderstorms had blown it out badly and it was only just coming down enough to really fish well. The water level was higher and the water a bit murkier than usual.
At the first pool, it became obvious pretty quickly that the chub and shiner were swarming. We knew it was going to be a high-score cyprinid day and we more or less embraced that. James doggedly fished his black woolly bugger all day. I fished mostly a Frenchie and Bead Head Hotspot Killer Bug tandem, but went to the woolly buggers in the trouty section in search of the big ‘uns.
James was pretty much shiner-proofed with the woolly bugger, though one of the little tykes managed to get its mouth around it. As we hoovered chub, it became clear that personal records were in the air. Mine was safe – the 180 I bagged around the same time at STSNBN last year. We couldn’t agree whether James’s was 24 or 25, but it was looking like it was moot, anyway.
There wasn’t much going for trout, but when we got to Cliff Pool and broke for lunch I tried the nymphs in the difficult head of the pool. There’s always a drowned tree lurking at the head, and the main flow does a 90 degree turn against some large dolostone blocks with a big undercut. It’s a few feet upstream from the recent behemoth tippet snap after dark. So I managed to get a decent drift without getting snagged. Then I thought I was snagged. Then a massive brown came steaming downstream with my fly. It was the same show as before, with a little more excitement because we could both see it. These fish that are killing me are outrageously large for the stream. Once more, this could have been pushing or exceeding 20 inches. Utterly nothing I could do. I was fishing the GM 39 at 390 and had a nylon 5X tippet on. I held on for the downstream run and got its head turned, then held on for the upstream run and stopped it from diving for the undercut. It came back downstream until it was right in front of me. Then, as always, it turned directly away, and as soon as it got all of its power on the tippet, poof, game over. Sigh. I don’t know if there’s a way to land these things with my equipment. I think I need a western rod so that I can at least let them run and give them line. And possibly fish with a stronger tippet.
The gods did yield me one little brown, so small I thought it was a shiner when I hooked it.
Among all the chub and shiners was a new cyprinid species. I still haven’t had time to identify it.
This time out, it apparently wasn’t enough to emotionally scar me with one broken off behemoth. It had to be two. At the nicest pool in the trouty section, pretty much the same thing happened. This time the beast actually had me running down from the bank, because when, inevitably, it got turned directly away, it was pulling straight on the lilian because the rod was fully extended, so the rod wasn’t acting as a shock absorber at all. I was scared it would pull the lilian off the tip, so ran forward to try to get the rod bent again. I did, then the monster promptly snapped the tippet. Each of these incidents happened in nearly the same place as one of the first two. Good chance it’s the same two fish punishing me multiple times.
Anyway, as the day got late the action turned toward James’s record. He blew through it fairly early, padded by the count at his own personal spot, “chub pool”.
However many his old record was, the new one is now 35. 34 creek chub and one brave shiner.
I caught one more game fish, a rare (for here) smallmouth bass.
When we toted it up, it turns out that it was the highest single day catch from STSNBN, at 181 combined it beat out last year’s 180 day. I caught 82 shiner, 60 creek chub, 1 hornyhead chub, a brown trout, the new unidentified critter, and 1 smallmouth bass.
It was a fun day, capped by the usual stop in Lamont for ice cream bars and orange Gatorade.