Following the cabin stay I headed out west to Utah and Nevada for fieldwork, the first of five long western trips during the year. Unlike 2016, however, I didn’t take James and I didn’t do any fishing. The trip got ended early due to the record snow pack in the west – we couldn’t get to the final locality in southeastern Idaho because it was still under snow in June. Oh well, more time for fishing.
I was itching to return to SSTW and explore it further, so the first day I had available saw me getting on the water there as early as I could. This time I explored a completely different section of the stream. I was a bit worried when I started because there’d been some thunder and the water was somewhat off colour. Didn’t matter.
There were some moments of high excitement, but the whole thing was kind of like raiding a candy store. Water I’d never fished before, and trout pretty much everywhere you’d expect them to be.
I fished a black slump buster all day on the TUSA Sato. 2017 has kind of become the Year of the Slump Buster. Last year was nymphs, nymphs, nymphs. The things that attract me to the slump buster, aside from catching a ton of fish, are that it kind of screens out most of the common shiners – they’re game but their mouths aren’t that big. On some streams if you fish a killer bug you’re kept busy prying it out of the gullet of, like 70 shiners. The other thing about slump busters is that they attract large trout. I think nymphs are probably more effective in terms of numbers caught, but meaty/fluffy streamers seem to give a better shot at the big ones. And SSTW has big ones.
A few smallmouths got in the net as well. I saw far more than I caught – for whatever reason the black slump buster is only moderately effective for them. One of them was kind of interesting:
I was storming along merrily, catching a steady procession of moderate sized rainbows and brookies (10-12″, typically). As I got further downstream I encountered some stunning pools. Spine-tingling pools. Pools you pretty much know have to have trophy fish in them. Didn’t take long.
The first yielded a 17″ rainbow, easily the largest since I resumed fishing, along with two smaller rainbows. It kicked off a series of stunning pools which in short order turned up not one but two 15″ rainbows.
I fished until dusk without running out of stream, and only reluctantly turned around. I could probably have caught more with darkness coming on, but I packed the rod away for the walk back as I had a good distance to cover and didn’t want to get caught doing some reasonably serious fords in the dark.
For once, there really wasn’t a lot to complain about. I lost a few trout, but not many, and I caught the three largest rainbows since resuming. As it turned out, this was the single best day on this water so far, but that was mainly because the summer took me all over the place and the fall has been eaten up with academics – I only managed to get back to it on three more days after this, twice with James. I don’t have a detailed tally for this day, but the photographs show 19 distinct rainbows, four brook trout, and three smallmouths. I think there were probably a few rainbows and smallmouths that weren’t photographed, but not many.
Is this Sny Magill?
Nope. Sny Magill can be great, though.