The 7th started out cooler and under clouded skies but it would end up turning around and becoming spring for a day. I met up with a friend of mine to fish a piece of recently scoured creek, the snow melt combined with a bit of rain had flooded the creek just enough to scour the holes out and clean some of the riffles up. White rocks clear of sediment and some invertebrates (there are trade offs with a bankful event) showed the power of water. In a few places the creek had blown way over her banks and attempted to channel a more direct path. We haven’t had many high water events over the last year or more, in fact I can’t
think of even one event that sent the creeks out of their banks. Over this time sediment had collected throughout the creek we fished and the recent high water helped changed things up a bit.
Slightly stained water and rising water temps equal one thing to me…streamers, including my new test subject (more on that later). Fly chucking, moving through every inch of creek we fishing upstream hard. By the days end we would cover about four miles of trout water and touch quite a few brown trout, oh and a single brookie. The sun came out about an hour after arrival, the wind was low and for the next five hours we fished under glorious conditions. The trout were active, smacking my SMB regularly throughout the day. Carl landed a few nice trout including one that had a frog leg sticking out of it’s mouth? Think about that for a second, that frog leg was good sized and the trout maybe 13/14inches, that says something about their appetite and with a big meal on it’s way down that trout smacked Carl’s streamer hard wanting more. I was broke off by one fish I didn’t get a look at but it felt good, haven’t been broke off on 3x tippet in quite a while. All in all we had a blast and we took full advantage of the time we had knowing that the coming week would bring, rain, snow and ice and put a halt to the warm weather that was much appreciated.
No BWO’s were seen however the midges were out but only a scant few trout were surfacing all day. The rocks I did inspect showed plenty of Baetis nymphs but they all looked a bit immature yet and I would still give them another week of decent weather before they start going hard. If we get a fast warm up over a short period of time in the next couple weeks I wouldn’t be surprised if BWO’s, Grey Caddis and Dark Hendrickson’s all begin to come off on some of our creeks.
- Carl and a Brown
- Scoping out the Water
- This Looked Interesting
- Carl and the Creek
- Frog Leg??
- The New Mini Streamer









