We got up around seven on Friday morning. It had gotten down to 60 during the night, so we wore our hoodies/fleece to start with. I made a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs over easy, mushrooms, and strawberry/rhubarb toast. By the time we ate it and got packed up it was almost nine. We headed for STSNBN, with the temperature set to hit 82 and a small possibility of thunderstorms late in the day.
We arrived to find the parking lot empty, geared up, and headed down.
STSNBN was also very low and clear. They must have had far less rain on Monday than we did.
The fishing was okay, but not as good as it’s sometimes been. Only one trout was definitely on the line all day, and it escaped. We saw lots of trout sulking in the deep portions of pools, with the water so low we could see more than normal. They were generally uninterested in anything we did, and we spooked a lot of them.
This was the first trip with the new Olympus TG-4 camera. I generally liked it, but I need to learn and tinker with it. Just using the default Auto setting often let to metering problems and excessive glare. Darker, shadowed stream and bright sky tended to lead to a trainwreck.
I did okay with the cyprinids, eventually catching 60 creek chub and 43 shiners. I used a Utah killer bug a lot, and also did some nymphing with gold ribbed hare’s ears and pheasant tail nymphs. I ended up losing all the flies I had of both. James stuck with an olive woolly bugger all day. I went to a number 10 black woolly bugger occasionally, especially when trying to raise trout in the deeper pools. I had some follows throughout the day, but the only serious strike came in the final bend pool. It wasn’t that large a trout, but it expertly ran upstream to a large submerged rock and before I could react snagged the woolly bugger on the rock and escaped. You could see right to the bottom of this pool for the first time. There were three or four decent sized trout lurking in the very middle on the bottom, along with a horde of large creek chub holding at various depths. We caught a few, mostly smaller, chub and shiners. The larger fish weren’t much interested, although you could see them flash to feed near the bottom occasionally. I tried bouncing a copper john along the bottom and this did elicit some reactions, but no strikes except from a few smaller fish on retrieves.
James provided the highlights of the day, first catching his first ever bluegill, then embarking on a late, grim, take-no-prisoners quest to beat his personal record of 23 fish in a day.
We were fairly late turning around at the final bend pool, then slow returning as James was still fully engaged. He caught number 23 to tie his record at the final pool, and was hunting number 24 on the way back. I kept out a number 10 black woolly bugger to try for feeding evening trout. The only place I even saw a trout was a follow on one cast in main pool.
I figured James was a sure thing to get number 24 in chub pool, where he’d caught two or three early, so I herded us there, stopping only for a few trout casts in the obvious places.
He got set up above chub pool and it didn’t take long.
After that he wisely packed it in and I packed up his rod. I kept trying for trout until main pool, then also collapsed my rod. It was the latest we’ve stayed on the stream.
A pretty okay day. James got a new species and his highest catch total. Disappointingly little action from the trout and we ended up very bug bitten, hot, and tired. But I wouldn’t trade it.