Not The Same

There's always the desire to re-create success. However, sometimes it's best to move on and find new successes because no matter how good the second time is it can't live up to your memories. But with the success of the last trip (read about that Here) I couldn't wait to get back to the stream where we had such fast action. So, I was on my way to Jeff's house in the early morning with thoughts of lots of trout to be caught and even some hopes for some larger fish. 

In preparation for the return trip, I made sure to replace some of the flies that we'd lost during the previous trip and a few extras so we had plenty. The Purple Frenchie that had been so productive was at the top of the list, but I also tied up a few other variations just in case purple wasn't the color of the day. 

Jeff was ready to roll when I arrived at his house, so we didn't waste any time to get to our first spot. This was a spot that we've heard holds some really nice fish at certain times of the year, so we wanted to be the first ones to hit it for the day. Once we were rigged up and started fishing a couple hundred sheep came up to get a drink. Luckily, they tend to stay out of the water so we weren't too worried about them spooking any fish. The complicated currents and deep water made getting a good drift difficult, but we were shocked when we had no strikes and saw no fish. With no signs of life, and having exhausted our fly choices, we decided to move to an area where we had lots of success the other day. It didn't take more than a few casts for Jeff to hook into fish and get the skunk off of the day. 

It certainly felt like the day was going to take off as Jeff hooked into another brown on the purple Frenchie and I was itching to get in on the action. We started working our way upstream to fish some of the bigger pools, but the fishing really seemed to slow down. We were still making contact, but not nearly as often as we had hoped. 

Something was definitely different so we turned over a few rocks and even pumped one fish's throat hoping to figure out what was going on to get our catch rate up. The fish were feeding on midge pupa that were very active, and plentiful. We changed up our flies to match the hatch and picked up a few more fish, but our catch rate didn't go up like we'd hoped. I'm not sure, but I think with so many flies available to the fish we only caught the ones that we happened to drift our tiny flies right to. With evening coming on Jeff caught one more fish in what seemed like would be our last hole of the day. 

We moved upstream to see what was around the bend and I saw something that I've been looking forward to since last fall, rising fish. These fish were spread out in shallow water sipping off the surface. I tied on some 6x tippet and connected it to a large Purple Haze to act as an indicator and tied an RS-2 emerger as a dropper. My leader was pushing 14 feet long with some fine tippet, so I was shocked when the first fish that I worked up to spooked. I didn't think that my set-up needed any adjustment, so I approached the next fish as stealthily as I could and made sure to not let my leader land where the fish was feeding. While he didn't spook, the fish also didn't buy what I was selling and before I could switch out my dropper all the fish in the pool stopped rising. 

Rather than re-rig and try to dredge up one more fish we decided to call it and make the walk back to the truck. The fishing was less than what we'd hoped for, but it was a good day on the water with good company and we even found a few willing fish. Who could ask for more? 

Hope you're as lucky,

Kidder