James and I headed out on May 15 to a state preserve I visited last year, the last patch of pre-European forest left in Iowa. Last year’s visit was early in my revivified fishing career and I only caught a few chub. The notables were catching the first fish with a fly I’d tied myself (a creek chub on a black woolly bugger) and getting briefly lost in the pathless woods on the way back to the car.
The DNR says that there is a “low density” brown trout population on the more remote west side of the preserve. It’s fingerling stocked annually. Last year I came in from the south and tracked west to a tributary marked as fishable water on the DNR stream map. I found it was protected by a cliff and so tiny it had almost no holding water. This year we came from the east side and picked up the main stream almost right away, following it down all its length east to west across the preserve.
I hadn’t seen any definite browns last year, but I was hopeful the chub would keep us occupied. That’s how it turned out. We caught three creek chub and a shiner from the first little pool, and worked down an upstream stretch with a number of good pools. There was no sign of trout in this upper stretch at all, but plenty of chub.
As we moved downstream, the flow was increasingly diminished and both holding water and large fish disappeared. I knew there was good potential trout water way downstream after the tributary joined from the south, so we pushed ahead. It was a bit of a slog both going and coming back, but it was lovely surroundings, with high dolostone cliffs all around.
We got to the more open bottom stretch late in the afternoon and started catching chub again as the flow ramped back up. We didn’t have a lot of time and didn’t go all the way to the western preserve boundary (where last year it turned out a farmer had put up a blockade right across the stream). We did, however, encounter several trout and hooked a couple, but landed none. I had two decent sized browns on the line for a while (they were in the 10-11 inch range), and losing them stung a little extra after what happened a few days earlier at STSNBN. Still, it was enough to confirm there’s a chance to catch a few trout. There’s no easy way to access the trouty stretch and it’s not very long, so the work/reward ratio isn’t great. If the stream was fishy all of its length, instead of having a low-flow middle part, it would be a little more interesting. But it’s a beautiful place and I’m pretty sure I’ll go back. I’d really like to catch a trout from this stream. Next time I’ll try to plan it to arrive at the trouty section with more time left and fish through the couple of hours of evening towards nightfall. It will make for an interesting walk in the dark back out, but there’s no chance of getting lost as it’s all along the stream.
James fished a black woolly bugger on his Kosansui Fine Mode all day. I fished a black sparkle bugger on the GM 39 down to and through a bit of the trouty section, losing a couple of browns on it, then switched to nymphs. I lost the largest brown on a girdle bug dropped like a depth charge into a large plunge pool. James caught 10 chub; I caught 40-some and a few shiners.