The day after my log adventure, I planned to fish another of the handful of streams with protected water. It’s so heavily fished in its stocked sections that there isn’t much point in being coy. I went up to Marquette and fished Bloody Run. I planned to start in the lower stocked section by a county campsite, and walk upstream to the middle, relatively isolated, protected stretch. Bloody Run has some unique things. It’s the largest (across) of the Iowa trout streams, and it has some of the longest contiguous fishable water, at several miles. I’d only ever crossed it on the highway. Well, it’s nice on paper. In practice…not so much.
Any hopes of a bit of woodsy solitude were dashed pretty soon after I turned off the highway. As I passed the campsite, I saw loads of trailers and tents and lots of hairy dudes. A homemade sign announced “Trout Stag”. This is a great start, I noted. When I got to the parking lot, a spin guy had just entered the water in front of me. I took my time getting geared up and he disappeared up around a bend. As what I was really shooting for was the upstream protected section, I figured I’d head past him, pointedly not fishing the water around him, and not start fishing until a polite distance upstream. That’s what I did. Not five minutes later, the ****er came storming past me. He had to have sprinted over a whole bunch of pools he’d been planning to fish. I just shook my head and kept fishing. I saw lots of dudes on this lower stocking portion through the day. It’s right beside several towns and on a main scenic byway. I doubt there’s much downtime. The fishing was oh-okay. I mostly worked the GM 39 with tandem nymphs. I’d only managed to tie three Frenchies, lost one the previous day, and lost the other two fairly quickly. Of course they were by far the most popular fly. I worked a mix of things afterward, including hare and copper, commercial Prince (one I bought last year and another I magically discovered when I came out of a silly cross-stream cliff-climb to retrieve my last egg fly, snagged, with one more fly than I went in with), McFly foam egg, Copper John, and later on a Utah Killer Bug. I didn’t catch any stocker brookies or rainbow, but they’d been pretty hard culled as it was days since the last stocking. I got a fair bit of action from browns, mostly in deep riffles between the pools.
The stocking section ended at a railway trestle, with a lovely deep pool beneath it. I caught some chub and a couple of browns from it.
The people disappeared when I got to the special regulation section. The only regulations are a 14″ minimum for browns and artificial lures only. It was something of a chore, as in three separate places the stream relaxed out into shallow muddy areas the size of several football fields. The banks were choked with brush and the bottom was too muddy to wade. They also held few or no fish. In between these there’d be a few little bends with holding water. Then you had another slog.
The only fish I caught in the protected part came from one beauty pool upstream. I caught them both on a Utah Killer Bug, a fly I hadn’t fished in a long while.
Eventually I came to an access point mentioned by Jene Hughes, from Jade Avenue. Here all of the trees, shrubs, and everything else for a long section of stream had been chainsawed down. And dumped in the stream. Some of the banks had been burned. Looking out on it all was a big house up on the valley top, with music blaring and yahoos yelling. I got a bit defeated at that point. I have no idea who cut half the valley down and threw it in Bloody Run or why. But it turned a quarter mile stretch into a nearly still, opaque, backed up pond, with no possibility of fishing. I went a bit above that, but I was wiped from the four hours of banging a frying pan the day before and I’d already walked a long way. This was the first sunny and warm fishing day of the year. I’d managed to forget my water back at the cabin. And I hadn’t been conscientious about keeping up with the sunblock, so I discovered my neck, chest, and arms were burned. And I wasn’t catching much. So I turned around about 4.30 pm.
I came back through the stocker section in late afternoon, and was able to take a look at some of the water I’d skipped in an attempt to be polite earlier. It was dominated by an absolutely huge pool on a bend with a little beach along it. Here, some baitfishers had been holding court. They’d left behind a Cabela’s plastic bag, stuffed full of beer empties and neatly tied. Beside it lying on the ground were the empties that didn’t fit. And around everywhere were scattered cigarette butts. It’s like this everywhere these bozos turn up. They’re probably not all bozos. But a good proportion of them are. I started trying unusual fly combinations. The strangest was a 14 hare and copper with a huge Girdle Bug hung off its bend. What was strange was that it generated a ton of follows when fished like a streamer. But the fish would chase the hare and copper. It almost seemed like they though the Girdle Bug was another fish, and they wanted to beat it to the prize. I only managed to catch a single fish this way, the last of the day. And once again, a brown.
Eh. I have to say I’m not going to be falling over myself running back to Bloody Run. It’s very pretty if you ignore the trash and yahoos.
