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.
