With the weather forecast at home on Sunday supposed to be sunny and beautiful, there was only one thing I could think of to do. Wake up at 5 am after losing an hour of sleep to the time change and drive for hours into a forecast of 100% rain. Anymore, I really enjoy fishing on days where fair weather fisherman would rather stay home, when else could you have a Class A wild trout stream all to yourself? After talking with a good friend for a few months about fishing, we finally found some time on the water together. We pulled into the parking lot and surprisingly the weather was decent. It was overcast and the water looked excellent despite lower flows than I'd normally like to fish. We got out of the car to gear up and it started dumping rain on us. Perfect weather to chase brown trout right? That's why they make wading jackets. We started out at one of my favorite holes, Ross hooked a nice fish right away and lost it at the net. A good sign, so I thought. After cycling through every nymph I thought should work, not even a take. I left the normally productive hole and worked up through a small channel that's usually good for a fish or two. I heard something over the loud current and looked down stream to see Ross holding up a nice fish.
I ran down to snap a picture for him, not a bad catch for one of his first few wild browns. I asked what pattern he took and when he told me, I couldn't believe I didn't try it with the conditions we had. Good thinking Ross! Things started to look up from there.
We flipped some rocks in the shallow fast water on the way up stream to check out some of the bug life. We found an abundance of small BWO nymphs and tiny green Caddis. We worked up through another productive section of water and caught a few nice fish on Ross's pattern at a pretty decent rate.
After not having much luck in the pocket water, I saw some little black stones coming off, so I switched over to a suggestive pattern that I thought would work. I was right. I picked up a few fish while picking apart the tiny seams and eddies. Seems like the fish in this type of water have been into the small stuff lately.
Despite wearing wading jackets, we were fairly soaked by this point. It probably rained about a half of an inch on our heads as we worked up through the first section. We worked up to a section that I've yet to fish due to it usually being a little too deep at higher flows, today it was perfect. We switched back over to a bigger pattern and Ross landed a nice fish right away. A few cast later using a new deep nymphing technique I've been having luck with, I hooked into something heavy in 10-12 ft of water. As usual, I got overly excited and horsed him off of the bottom, causing him to freak out and shred my 5x off of a boulder. Ross got a good look at him and said he was in the 18-19" range. My heart sunk when I realized how good of a fish it was. We moved on and up towards the head of the hole. I picked up a few fish deep again and lost my rig to a boulder. As I was tying on, I heard Ross say "Fish On". I looked down and knew instantly he had something better than average on so I went down to assist. Unlike me moments before, he calmly fought him in on his 11' 3wt (I really need to invest in one of those, I was impressed with how it performed). After tangling with him for a minute or so he dropped into my net a very pretty above average sized fish for this creek.
After talking about what a great experience it was for a few moments, we moved up to fish one last little run. I picked up four fish quickly on some small stuff before the rain picked up really heavy.
We started the long hike back to the car and felt pretty good about how the day went. Even though conditions weren't ideal and we were soaked, we put up nice numbers. It could have been worse, we could have stayed home and enjoyed the nice weather doing something silly like golfing. I'm really starting to enjoy getting out on the water when conditions and flows are bad. I'm really beginning to enjoy being one of the few foul weather fisherman.
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