I finished recording lectures for a new online course offering, an activity that has devoured my life since April. I celebrated by charging out camping with James about six hours later, on five hours sleep. We headed directly to Bear Creek on the Thursday to see how the trout were getting on one week after the beauty day when we caught 26. Bear Creek isn’t supposed to be stocked in July and August, so it seems like those trout were the base for any holdover fishing in the height of summer.
We didn’t get an early start because I didn’t finish the lectures until after midnight and had no time to do any preparation, so had to sort out all the camping gear and load the car in the morning. For a one night car camping trip, you’d think we were going trekking in the Himalayas. I need to start putting some thought and effort into paring down what’s crammed in. Anyway, we arrived at Bear Creek a bit after 10 to find a satisfyingly empty parking lot.
There had been thunderstorms on the preceding Monday, so I wasn’t sure exactly what we’d find water-wise. It turned out that the stream was the lowest and clearest I’d ever seen it, quite a bit less flow than a week earlier.
The fishing was a bit slower than the preceding week, but still a pretty impressive day for trout. We started at the first downstream stocking pool and again worked our way down to the bottom bend pool. We didn’t catch anything in the first pool, though it looked lovely. It had lots of recent footprints, and somebody had built a fire, defacing the pretty little gravel bank. It likely had been heavily fished by bait anglers in the preceding week. Our impression through the day was that the main stocking pools were well off from the week before, but that the water in between that was less accessible still seemed to be holding good numbers of trout.
A highlight was James catching a nice sized (by our current standards) smallmouth. Smallmouth are absolutely crazy fighters, moreso even than rainbows. Rainbows will often breach, but twice we’ve had smallmouths jump completely out of the water like performing dolphins.
By the end of the day, James had caught 3 creek chub, 3 rock bass, 2 shiners, 2 smallmouth, and a rainbow. I’d caught 20 chub, 16 shiners, 14 rainbows, 4 rock bass, a smallmouth, and a brookie. 16 trout versus 26 the week before. As I said above, the difference seemed to lie mostly in the stocking pools with paths to them, which seemed largely devoid of fish this time. We were using size 12 olive woolly buggers for the most part.
We headed over to Six Pines Campground in Backbone State Park. I was curious to see how crowded it might be in high season. One thing, it was nine bucks instead of the six dollars charged in April and May. There were only about six other campsites occupied. One of them, however, was a youth group in a van. You could see everyone else was sort of hunkered down as far from them in every direction as possible. It wasn’t too bad. They seemed like teenagers with a couple of adults riding herd, so it’s not like they were partying. Just shouting and shrieking and braying in loud voices. A lot. But they shut up at 10 pm, so no real complaint. I can never get used to mass public campsites. It’s like staying at a Super 8 without walls. I’d rather be off in solitude in the wilderness. But you take what you can get.
Anyway, after a day of processing plump planted trout we had a dinner of hamburgers on the Coleman. I killed and cooked a rainbow from Richmond Springs earlier and I don’t rule out practicing more trout cooking, but I’m finding I’m just not motivated to take them from the stream for the most part. Especially from Bear, where the supply is going to be finite until stocking resumes in September.
I love sitting watching a campfire in the dark, sometimes reading with my headlamp. This time, I discovered just how infested with raccoons Six Pines is. I’d actually had a tug of war with one in April over my trash bag at 4.45 am. One tried to make off with our trash while we were both sitting by the campfire this time. Then after James went to bed, they kept huffing and grunting up to the fire. Then I’d turn my headlamp on and there’d be a raccoon in the headlights moment. Then they’d sort of huff in irritation and waddle away, trying a wider tack to get to the picnic table. It eased off when I put basically everything back in the trunk of the car. Then I thought to crank my headlamp and sweep the mostly empty middle grass area of the campground. It was almost creepy, at least five or six raccoons schlepping and huffing around in different parts of it, each with their eye on one of the occupied sites. Raccoons look like they should be cute. They aren’t.