It had been a while since I was out fishing last. Summer, in all its glory, has found one obligation after another for me, and a day on a weekend that I could justify spending the entirety of out mucking around on a stream had been rare.
With the Fourth of July come and gone, it was hard not to feel like summer was already on the wane. So, with a Sunday my own and despite the fact that I didnft get to sleep until about 2:00 the night before, I set the alarm for 6 a.m. and heeded its call (and my wifefs nudge) as gray light seeped into the bedroom in the morning.
I have developed something of a strategy for early morning departures with trout stream destinations. It starts the night before: Get stuff in car and where it will be in front of my nose in the morning. Clothes, whatever. Then, get to bad ASAP. In the morning, no gsnoozeh button. Just get up and point myself toward the door. Get into clothes en route. Maybe some water. Just get on the road so as not to waste the benefit of such an early, and painful, awakening.
When I got to the river it was 7:30 and I was feeling pretty good after a big cup of coffee and some breakfast on the way. I went to a favorite old access point on the Nettle River, a bridge with a name that always makes me wonder about its history. It was a bright day by the time I got there, but when the road dipped down toward the river and into the trees, it suddenly became cool, damp and shady.
Itfs a good time of the year to fish, even though the water is low and clear, the fish smart and spooky, and the bugs hatch at godawful early hours of the day. The reason it is a good time to fish is that not many people do. When I got to this bridge, there were two other cars there; I have seen the same parking area full at earlier times of the season, 12, maybe 14 cars jammed in. I have even fished it at those times of the year, but I have walked miles along the bank to get a stretch of my own.
Today, after rigging up, I walked down to the river, saw fish rising, and fished there for three or four hours.
I didnft just see fish rising in that pool below the bridge, I saw the surface of the water boiling with their rises. I had really never seen anything quite like it. A certain hope had been fulfilled a thousand times over: Tricos (Tricorythodes). Little tiny mayflies that do their business in the early hours of late summer mornings and then collapse to the water in great blanketing numbers. When I saw the fish going crazy in the tailout of the riffle, I looked immediately to the sky downstream and saw a cloud of bugs like I had never seen before.
The trout were swimming around frantically, literally with their open mouths protruding from the water as they inhaled the bugs on the water.
I tied a Trico spinner onto some 6x tippet and crept down in the water. I was prepared to be stealthy, but it ended up seeming completely unnecessary. The trout were so obsessed with their breakfast that they never seemed to notice my presence, or even the occasional member of their pod being violently pulled from their midst.
As might be apparent by now, participating in a hatch of this magnitude was a pretty new thing to me. Ifve fished Tricos before and it had been a good time but had also lived up to its reputation for challenge. Today, my biggest challenge was one of numbers, specifically the sheer number of natural insects on the water. My fly just couldnft stand out in the crowd.
Luckily, the advantage I enjoyed also came from a matter of numbers: the number of fish feeding. Standing where I stood for the whole morning, I counted dozens and dozens of fish in front of me, moving up and down the pool as a pod, feeding incessantly. If my fly passed by five snouts that chose one of the naturals on the water, the sixth fish would take mine.
Though the taking of fish wasnft as intense as the activity in the stream, mostly due to the gWherefs Waldo?h effect described above, I did all right. What was as surprising as anything this morning was the size of the average fish I was hooking. I got a couple that went to about 15-16 and a few in the 13-14 bracket. For a river that produces so many fish in the 10-12 size, it was a lot of fun to have that kind of bend in my rod.
With its sheer intensity, it was hard to imagine the hatch ever ending, the water ever calming. But, I noticed it slacken a little about the same time I finally paused to sit on the bank and have a smoke. I could still see several fish, but they were beginning to drop back, hanging under the surface a few inches, darting up to grab the occasional morsel. When I resumed fishing, I got a couple more, but they were smaller than before and I realized that the fun was over for this morning.
I stayed there for another hour or so. I tried some subsurface tactics to no avail, and, without the compelling sight of active fish, my interest waned. As did my energy levels, the reality of the previous nightfs four hours of sleep hitting me. I didnft mind at all when I headed back up to the car and it wasnft yet 11 a.m. I ate a snack and had some water on the bridge, watching a few little trout clean up the leftovers on the surface.
I didnft bring the camera along, as I often do, and I was okay with that. It was a beautiful day, with blue skies and the lush greens of summer, a day to simply enjoy and remember as best I can, and to hope Ifm fortunate enough to repeat again sometime.
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