James returned from the United Kingdom on Thursday evening. We scheduled a play–it-by-ear fishing day on Friday, as he was working on a six hour jet lag. We decided on Bear Creek (Fayette) because there’s not a lot of walking and it’s easy to bail from in case he got tired. We got on the stream around 9 am and he put on a brave face, but it turned out he’d woken up at 3.40 am and not gotten back to sleep and he was very pale and had a headache. The stifling heat and humidity probably didn’t help. I caught a rock bass and a chub and we saw a few trout but failed to catch any and we beat a retreat after only half an hour or so.
Back in the Jeep with the air conditioning blasting, we perked up a bit. My plan was to just go home and relax, but we stopped at the roadside pool upstream at Grannis. The water was way down, just like it is everywhere, but there were two stockers lying in the tail. The fish in the shallow tail spook as you walk down, there’s just no way I can see to avoid it. Up at the plunge pool there were three more holding. I hooked one using James’s Fine Mode Kosansui and a black woolly bugger. Then I caught a rainbow.
Everything else was spooked after that, so we headed off. James felt better and better and by the time we got near Lamont we’d decided to get cold Gatorade and ice cream bars and head into Backbone State Park to have lunch at the picnic shelter at the source of Richmond Springs. It was absolutely swarming with people, very much like our first ever Iowa outing. We had lunch and James was keen to fish again, so we inserted ourselves into the crowds. Neither of us was taking it too seriously. Some of it was a bit surreal. A portly, not very jolly, man sort of latched onto us. He had a spinning rod with a little white jig and was carrying around a five gallon home store bucket. Ominous sloshing sounds came from it and sure enough when we took a look while he was fishing, it was half full of water and two luckless still-alive rainbows were splashing around in it. Whenever we’d move, he’d follow us. And stand right beside us. And plop his little jig in. This was more funny than anything else, as hordes of alpha daddies with their big trucks and their families and grandmothers with their grandkids and dogs and etc swarmed all over the place, all armed with spin rods (well, not the dogs). Our companion felt that they shouldn’t stock brook trout because they cooked up too soft. I nodded. Just so. Indeed.
I might have to amend my wonderings about the vegetation cover at Bixby last week. Richmond Springs was now heavily vegetated, and the slow pools were almost covered in many cases with the same small floating plants. So maybe it’s just the time of year and maybe Bear/Bixby has more fishable water at other times. I was surprised, because I’ve been visiting Richmond semi-regularly over the summer and there’s been no previous hint of it. Anyway, it was stocking day, was why there were hordes of people, so the stream was heaving with confused trout. There were clear channels among dark green banks of vegetation growing from the bottom, and the trout liked to hide and dash out for anything you plopped in. Like the similar stocking situation at Little Paint Creek, at some pools you could just stand in front of 20-30 fish. Most of them just sat there, but often one or two would chase a fly. I ended up catching two rainbow and a small stream-born brown (there are naturally reproducing browns at Richmond), when I could get a fly in the water among the bait hooks and jigs. James caught a rainbow with a series of nice, difficult cross-stream casts to a small channel. He only had a couple of feet of reach to play the fly, placed it, got a failed strike, saw the trout move upstream, cast perfectly in front of its nose again, and hooked it. Then he had to keep it out of the plants as he brought it in.
Because we were just sort of taking it as it comes, for a while after lunch we only had his rod and took turns with it. I love my Rhodo, but I’m not sure he didn’t get the better of the deal. The Fine Mode is just so light, it feels like waving a fairy wand around and the Rhodo felt like a tree trunk when I went back to it. I prefer the flex of the Rhodo (when it’s fully extended, anyway) for real tenkara casting, but the Fine Mode has more backbone when you’re trying to steer a fish around.
It was fun for what it was and we weren’t trying very hard. I hooked five or six and failed to land them. For a good portion we were in civvies, not fully kitted out, and I didn’t have my landing net – I could probably have scooped up some of them but was trying to gently beach them. Considering neither of us had ever seen a tenkara rod before April, it was nice to return to the first spot we’d tried and just casually catch fish. We’re a long way from experts, but we’re not beginners any more either. We packed it in around 2.30 because the heat was getting ridiculous. So what had seemed like maybe a no-go turned out to be a pleasant and relaxed outing and a five trout day. Stocking day at Richmond Springs is kind of a low rent carnival atmosphere. If you just sort of roll with it for its entertainment value, it’s not the worst place in the world to be.