Weather: 73, sunny, increasingly hazy in afternoon and evening
Some days you just hit it right. One of the things I remember from my first career in fly fishing is that there are grim days and there are amazing days and you can’t really ever predict what you’re going to get. But if you keep at it, the amazing days come. I’ve already had one that I’d count – my solo day on STSNBN when I caught 180 and tapped back into the stream-raised browns. Now we got another, a virtually perfect day full of hefty planted trout.
We were actually headed originally to STSNBN to try to break our two-trip losing streak with the browns. We suited up there, descended, and discovered high but fairly clear water. However the fish were strangely absent. The first pool always yields 5-10 chub and shiners when things are right. Usually you’ll see schools lying in the current, and several will enthusiastically charge your fly as it hits the water. James caught a shiner in the lower part of the pool. I threw a woolly bugger around in the upper part, where I’d briefly hooked a trout two trips ago. Nothing. Nada. I didn’t see a single fish of any description. I guess the water was still too high. So we called that off and decided to see what Grannis and Bear were like.
We passed the lot at Grannis – one truck. We headed to the upper pool by the one lane bridge. Nobody there so we had a go. The water level was low and perfectly clear. Lots of footprints and bucket impressions, including some that looked like earlier that morning. No fish. You can usually see trout holding deep toward the rear of the bowl pool at the head. I couldn’t see a fish. I’m guessing nearly a week had passed since the last stocking, though I didn’t check the schedule. Fished out. Going back past Grannis, the truck was pulling out, but I didn’t think it was worth stopping. Instead I was reasonably hopeful for Bear, which I knew had been stocked a week earlier.
There was nobody at the parking lot so fine, lovely weather and an empty stream. I carried James’s waders down so he didn’t have to struggle.
We started at the first of the lower stocking pools. The water looked about perfect, much clearer than my last visit. We saw a trout immediately, in the run along the big rock. I let James have a go as soon as I got the follow, trying to get him his first trout, but we didn’t see it again. The day started slowly, but it was lovely. Swarms of butterflies kept swirling around us as we fished. I got some follows further down in the pool. Then a trout rose in the main part, between us. James cast a woolly bugger toward it but got no action, so went back up to the run. I moved up and had a go and a brook trout charged up from the depths and hit.
[A note here about fish photographs. As I get back into it, I see a lot of discussion about handling fish and the damage inflicted by keeping them out of the water for too long. And criticism of “hero shots”. With the rare exception of one or two stocked trout on a camping night (so far a grand total of one trout since resuming fishing) we release all of the fish we catch. I don’t apologize for taking the odd “hero shot”. Since I bought my Shimano folding net, all the trout we catch are netted, and they stay in the water while the hook is removed. I usually photograph them, but often in the net, raising them up out of the water a bit just to snap the photograph. Early on I wasn’t quite as conscious of this and beached the first few trout (I didn’t yet have a net). In rare cases the only way to land them due to high banks is to lift them out of the water. But in general the trout I catch don’t leave the water much any more. For the “hero shots” we do, we get ready while the fish is still in the water in the net. It comes out for at most 5-10 seconds to snap the shot, then it’s released. I’m pretty sure I’m not compromising their ability to recover.]
So it was already looking pretty good. We moved downstream and accessed the stream again at the next stocking point. Upstream from there was a pool with a tree across a deep pocket.
I flipped a woolly bugger in on the upstream side of the tree and got an immediate missed strike. Perfect. So I switched James in to my position. The fish took his woolly bugger on his first cast. First time he’d ever had a trout on the line and you could see the shock on his face as the rod bent like crazy and the rainbow charged around. I was thinking “pleasepleaseplease” as I deployed the net. Not a problem. He played it in like a pro, I grabbed the tippet and scooped the fish up.
We moved up to a little pool beneath a dolostone cliff slab. I let him have the cherry lower part while I cast to chub in the head. I was full of advice on where and how he should cast. He shut me up by promptly hooking up with his second trout.
We fished down to the corner pool at the end of the open portion of the valley, doing fairly well during the heat of the day. James took hold of my camera for the first time and took a photograph of me at the bottom pool.
We hit a new high in species caught. In addition to the stocked rainbows and brookies we caught the usual creek chub and common shiners. We also caught a couple of whatdats. Consulting the DNR list, Peterson, and the internet afterward makes me reasonably confident in identifying them as smallmouth bass and rock bass.
Around 3.30 pm we moved back up to have a go at the upstream section where I caught a couple of trout last trip. We got a taste of things to come when we crossed the stream on the stocking track, and I noticed the run beneath it looked decent with the water clear. I was thinking holding water for large chub, so tossed the woolly bugger in. Big rainbow nailed it, and came to the net. Apart from the access to the three stocking pools this section of the stream is murder to access from the banks, absolutely choked with thick vegetation, so we waded up the stream. We did well with chub in the shallow lower portion. When we got to the first pool, things exploded. Trout. Trout. Trout.
It got even better as evening arrived and wore on. At the higher pools, which are difficult to fish with overhanging trees, we were just getting continual action from 7 pm on. In the end we caught 20 rainbows, with James accounting for 6 of them, and 6 brook trout. I’m not sure if we’d managed to get there the day after a stocking or what. We were catching hefty 11-12″ stocking trout like we normally catch chub.
The only downer was I drowned my camera (hence no photos for the crazy upstream action). This was painful, as I’d drowned my iPhone and lost the photos of James catching his first ever fish. Now it looked like I’d lost the photos of him catching his first trout. The camera took immersion better than the iPhone, though, and came back to life at home, though the LCD screen might be toast. I really need to get a waterproof one. I have my eye on the new Olympus TG-4 but need to save some pennies.
Walking up out of the valley in late twilight was just serene. A perfect hush, in one direction a field of wildflowers, still trees against the late sunset, in the other a big yellow-orange moon refracting through the haze. I could have stood there forever.
So, a day which drained the box of most of the woolly buggers – need to restock at the store and get confident with tying them. As close to a perfect fishing trip as you could ask for.