fishing week, big road trip? [Archive] - Bill Kiene's Fly Fishing Forum

JasonB

04-23-2011, 02:16 PM

Well we did make it to the EW, although no further. We did find plenty of good, although tough fishing and came away happy and tired. I should warn you that the following is long winded babbling from an aspiring flyguy who has been paying some major dues all winter long with a LOT of skunk days and only a few tasty bits of success. So if you are in major jonesing for some fishing action and excitement you may get a bit of a stoke from reading (I hope!).

The first day worked out ok: a quick seine to see what bugs were on the menu (lots of little black ones, and some slightly greenish ones sz 16-20? oh well close enough for a couple of newbies). We picked out some nymphs that looked similar in size and color and I spent a few moments showing my wife some points on getting a good drift and line mending. My wife managed to hook AND land the first fish in less than 15 minutes setting the bar high with a good sized (16" or so?)brown. We each hooked but lost another in that same run but then the bite went cold for a while. I finally landed another nice brown later that afternoon after working a run HARD from all angles I could think of with several 2 nymph combos. I was thinking that I had done all I could there when my wife hooked up a much BIGGER one from the upper end of the same hole and lost it. Not bad considering that prior to coming here the biggest fish she'd had on the end of the line was maybe 10" at best. It also revived us both for one last bit of effort that day

Another half hour of me nymphing that upper part hard came up with nothing. At this point the wind had been getting worse to the point where getting a good drift was becoming all but impossible for me, so I tried pulling a streamer through it. Now I've never really known what to do when it comes to streamers (still don't honestly), but I had some vague ideas about how to make that streamer look like something that a big trout couldn't refuse. Sure enough, after perhaps 3-4 casts I just about had the rod yanked out of my hands! I played and landed a very nice rainbow that I guessed to be in the 18-20" range, and FAT (I think I just broke my previous BIG). While we each had some more bites, and another hookup it was clear that the fish were starting to win as our energies were waning. It was time to call it a day...

Off we went to soak our weary bones in the lovely hotsprings and gaze at the awesome snowpack on the jagged peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Day 2 was very similar, with a fair number of late strikes not quite panning out, a few hookups lost right before the net, and a couple of fish to hand each... and in between lots of down time trying not to get discouraged or loose focus. One good sized brown ran me out the bottom of one run, through the next pool and eventually down into the next riffle where the current was too strong for me to follow and broke me off. Upon re-rigging and heading back up to the same run, I managed to hook up again right away. This time I managed to keep the brown from running too far downstream and got to say hello up close and personal before releasing him. I also had a bit more action pulling some streamers on a sinking tip line, not a ton, but just enough to feel like I'm learning some in this new technique. Most of the action that day all came in a small window of about 2 hours or so in mid day, with an obvious hatch going on. After a late lunch break we went for a second round but this proved to be only frustrating with fighting the winds and loosing more flies to the river and ZERO love from the fish.

Day 3 started out sloooooow, all the usual places that we knew held fish just weren't giving us any interest at all, and I didn't see any other rods bent in action or hear any excited chatter of success from any of the other dozen or so anglers. All 3 days actually we had been hearing similar reports from most that we talked to: something along the lines of either "pretty slow", or a casual shrug and "yeah, got a few". This last day seemed much slower though, and after a few hours of next to zero action my wife had thrown in the towel and was making her interest in taking a lunch break be known "so, um... how much longer are you going to keep scratching up all those rocks on the bottom of this hole? I think maybe we should take a break". She only rolled her eyes slightly when I responded with the cliche: "ok, ok... just ONE last good drift and then I'm done..." This one panned out! An extremely feisty brown ran, and then jumped and twisted with a big splash. It took me a while longer than I usually like to play a fish, but I just couldn't quite get this one to settle down enough to bring it to the net. At least 3-4 more jumps and twists, a couple of long runs, and several attempts to ditch me in the major brush pile in the eddy... and even a couple of "net escapes" and I finally got my hands on it. Very satisfied, I agreed to take a break for lunch.

The afternoon even more interesting. As I was working my way up into decent position to work some nymphs along the edge of current up against a bunch of brush and overhanging trees I spotted a nice sized brown casually slurp some dries from the surface. A few VERY careful casts in an attempt to offer him my nymphs instead proved unsuccessful, and my last attempt actually put him down. Feeling foolish and not overly optimistic I figured that I might as well re-rig a dry fly setup and see if he would come back. I'd never hooked a fish that big on a dry ever, and I've not even really had much opportunity to sight cast to a good sized trout steadily feeding either. So with trembling hands I tied on my best guess imitation of the little mayflies he seemed to be slurping with a size 18 BWO dry.

My heart beat faster when I saw him start feeding again, but I also knew that this would be a very hard presentation for me to make as he was pretty much directly under a mess of branches that hung out just a few feet off the water. He was also in much slower water than the current in between us, so I knew that I could only get a good drag free drift for a couple of feet at most. After much careful practice casting well below him to make sure that I had my distance figured precisely I started trying my best at giving him a nice offering. It took at least a half dozen attempts, including a couple of near disasters with the bushes, before I finally got one right where I wanted it under the branches. I was able to watch the dark golden body start to rise as my fly came within his sight, and I even watched his mouth start to open as my fingers tightened on my line for the set... the second those lips broke the surface and sucked in my fly I was on him! A brief exciting struggle proved successful; I was buzzing with energy as I released him and I reflected that I had never felt such satisfaction from any other fish that I've caught. In reality, all of the trout my wife and I caught this week were ones we had really had to work for, but somehow these two that I had caught today were special. This last one in particular represented a level of work, and accomplishment that I'd heard about but never actually experienced.

My wife had come up from a spot downstream to tell me that she too had seen some fish slurping the surface but couldn't seem to get a good presentation to them and they wouldn't bite. We both watched these trout feeding for a few moments, they were in a very bad location for us to fish for so we just enjoyed the show until more and more risers started to appear. At first there were one or two feeding in the eddy below us, then 4-5... then there were some splashes upstream, and out in the middle of the stream... then steady risers in the eddy on the other side of the river... then more and more seemed to come from EVERYWHERE!. I decided to try my hand from the other side, so I crossed over to the eddy and waded in a bit as quietly as I could while fish continued to rise in greater and greater numbers all over.

It was a truly magical moment to be surrounded by dozens and dozens of 16-18" trout rolling and splashing the surface of the water on all sides of me... the hardest part was trying to decide just WHO I should cast to. If you're thinking that I started catching them by the dozens, as I was starting to think at that moment... well then, we both would be wrong there. I had many, many inspections and refusals in the eddy, and in the current I just couldn't see my fly at all in the glare and missed many a strike. After a handful of missed bites, refusals and brief hookups I changed to a lighter tippet and a #20 BWO emerger with a parachute that I hoped to be able to see (not much actually). Turned out that I could see better with less glare when looking downstream so I worked out a downstream presentation (another new thing for me) and right away started getting some better luck. In the end I caught 3 more there, and lost about 5 or 6 (and many more "2 wiggle hello-goodbys") as the downstream hookset was proving to be a lot harder for me.

Mostly I was just awed at the experience of being in the middle of such a feeding frenzy of large trout, feeling the excited energy of all these fish on an absolutely gluttonus feast. This ranks as my best day fishing ever, by far! While I realize that some of you may have had many such experiences, for a couple of newbies like my wife and I, this week turned out fantastic! Just coming here and getting ANY action at all would be good considering our lack of experience; making several breakthroughs in technique, including some much tougher problems solving, AND to have a day like this last one was just almost more than I felt I deserved... almost!:D
Many thanks for the help and advice that we got from some of the good folks here, wishing you all tight lines this season.
JB