Football started for us Monday…we play our opener this Friday so we were scheduled to go 11 straight days. Yesterday we were told we would get today off so my wife and I decided to spend our last free summer day lounging on the river. I didn’t plan to fish but I always have my gear in the Jeep. We just happened to post up across from long slow moving bank that had 5 good fish living on it.
The water is low, invisibly clear, the weather is hot and there aren’t any real hatches to speak of. This stretch was about 30 yards long and mid thigh depth. I was pretty surprised to see these big fish slowly rising to eat things that I never did see. There was a decent amount of fir needles and other small plant debris on the surface making it even more difficult to decipher what the rises were targeting. To make matters worse, my kid used up all my 5x tippet (he failed to mention that) when he borrowed my lanyard last week. I needed to go small and I had those bugs but 4x tippet was tough with size 16 and 18 bugs. We spent almost 4 hours on that bank and those big fish never left.
I made at least 8-10 fly changes before I hooked and lost the first of the big fish. I stopped and ate a sandwich while the run settled from that sow wallowing on the surface and My dog plunging out to retrieve the fish
. Another 5-6 fly changes and another 30 minutes had me LDR’ing another one of the 5 big fish. It was a poop show but it was also stolen time so I just chilled out and let the fish settle back in after each event. My wife was able to see the fish move and eat or reject the fly on every fish…she had never seen that before so that was fun.
Over the course of another couple hours and many many fly changes I hooked all the big fish is that stretch and actually landed one. My silly dog made it a lot more difficult than it needed to be but it was a lot of fun for all three of us.
The water is low, invisibly clear, the weather is hot and there aren’t any real hatches to speak of. This stretch was about 30 yards long and mid thigh depth. I was pretty surprised to see these big fish slowly rising to eat things that I never did see. There was a decent amount of fir needles and other small plant debris on the surface making it even more difficult to decipher what the rises were targeting. To make matters worse, my kid used up all my 5x tippet (he failed to mention that) when he borrowed my lanyard last week. I needed to go small and I had those bugs but 4x tippet was tough with size 16 and 18 bugs. We spent almost 4 hours on that bank and those big fish never left.
I made at least 8-10 fly changes before I hooked and lost the first of the big fish. I stopped and ate a sandwich while the run settled from that sow wallowing on the surface and My dog plunging out to retrieve the fish
. Another 5-6 fly changes and another 30 minutes had me LDR’ing another one of the 5 big fish. It was a poop show but it was also stolen time so I just chilled out and let the fish settle back in after each event. My wife was able to see the fish move and eat or reject the fly on every fish…she had never seen that before so that was fun.Over the course of another couple hours and many many fly changes I hooked all the big fish is that stretch and actually landed one. My silly dog made it a lot more difficult than it needed to be but it was a lot of fun for all three of us.
. The only reason he was there was because I had no intentions of fishing. He is a swimmer and a chaser of anything that splashes the water...we do love him, but he is far from a good fishing partner.
