East Walker trip
My wife and I have both been suffering from a significant lack of outdoor sleeping, road trips, mountain views, and trout fishing; in no particular order. Due to some fortune we both ended up with gaps in our work that matched, and reasonable weather in the forecast, so we packed the car and headed up over to the east side. The views were as spectacular as we’d hoped. At times we just enjoyed the views while listening to music, while at other times we talked of past adventures or discussed new ones to come. The air was fresh, and the ground wasn’t much harder to sleep on than we’d remembered... all in all life was back in order and we were starting to just feel like ourselves again. But the fishing???
Right. We did come with hopes of finding some fish, though we weren’t exactly sure just what to expect. For the most part we haven’t fished there in a few years due to the drought or low flows, and as the conditions have gradually returned we just seemed to be focused on other fishing (or work). The flows (300cfs) would be higher than what we’ve fished as well, so we weren’t quite sure how some of our favorite spots would work. The last two trips (after the worst of the drought) we didn’t find a lot of fish, but the size of the fish we did find was impressive. Overall it seems that the populations of rainbows has grown, but the numbers of Browns was much lower than past trips, from our own highly unscientific anecdotal experiences. We caught a few, and lost a few more.
We probably could have had higher levels of action if we had changed a few things. First off, we both were pretty committed to fishing streamers (probably 80% of the time), partly due to that I really hadn’t tied any nymphs and our nymph boxes were very sparsely populated and void of many key patterns... and partly due to that we hadn’t bothered to bring a seine. Why bother seining to see what’s on the menu if we probably don’t have any? I felt reminded throughout the trip that I’d kind of lost my edge a bit, and had grown a bit over confident on my ability to catch trout in whatever fashion I prefer. At times the fish were very keyed into something we weren’t fishing. We did have some good BWO hatches, but sadly no trout slurping them off the surface... we did have BWO dry flies ready to go! That was a little disappointing and frustrating, but at other times we did get some on streamers, which is always a blast. I did a mix of swinging and striping, whereas my wife was pretty much just swinging. We each hooked a couple of much larger fish, including what would have been the biggest brown I’ve ever caught. Key words: would have been! Unfortunately for us 100% of the big fish broke off due in part to the heavy currents, but also at least one was a result of a poor knot. Oh well, so it goes. We came home happy, and mostly rejuvenated till the next trip.
Side note: we noticed the “Three 95” cafe was open on our way home so we stopped in to try their lunch menu. Our last trip here we had a fantastic authentic Mexican breakfast, so we were eager to see if their lunches were as good. We were not disappointed! Great food, with great views of the mountains. We will be back...
JB
Last edited by JasonB; 04-18-2019 at 07:13 AM.
"Lord help me to be the person my dog thinks I am"
- unknown
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Sheepdog8404
Bookmarks