Sunday, August 16, 2009

Gettin' Wet

Kyle, Mike and I headed up to fish a private section of a river in hopes of catching some hogs. After about 10 minutes the guy who takes care of the land for his father rolled up. He told us we were on private property, we knew that. He told us to leave. Thanks to Conaster we were legally allowed to stay in the river to enjoy of its goodness and the big fish it holds. He was a nice enough guy and I understand the frustration of having someone in your backyard, but its hard to say you own a stream or the water or the mountains it comes from. Who knows if things will stay this way in the future, but for the time being we were going to be respectful and enjoy the river, and he accepted our legal right to do so. After a couple "foul hooked whitefish", I was finally able to keep a fish on long enough to snap a photo, beauty of a 16+ brown. We waded through some deep silty river and nymphed for a little while, ducking under the occasional barbed-wire fence.

I can't remember who, but someone casted up to a nice fishy looking spot and bam! a nice sized fish tried to eat the indicator. Cha-Ching. Mike and Kyle quickly changed to hopper patterns while I believed it was a fluke and kept on my nymph rig. I was wrong. We continued up the river and started catching big fish on hoppers. When I started flyfishing a few months ago, my buddy Nate told me of the insane goodness of hopper season. I was starting to doubt it was true, never really getting any big fish on hoppers. Wrong again, hopper fishing exists and its very very fun. The landowner met up with us later and appeared very angry, thinking it was impossible for us to wade up the river so far, but he calmed down after we offered to take him to any place on the river and wade through it in front of him. We kept on fishing and kept on having a grand ole time with hoppers and brownies. Hoppers, brownies, and whitefish in Kyle's case.

Mike had to get to work, so we waded back down to our cars. We were all ready to fall down from exhaustion, and Kyle actually took a few dips in the water to 'cool off' or because of his 'slippery boots.' Either way I saved him from certain death in some quicksand earlier in the day so I was allowed to get a kick out of him falling into the drink. Mike went to work and Kyle and I headed to a small stream on a scouting adventure. We caught a couple absolutely gorgeous small fish. After we saw three snakes, however, we were ready for home.

No comments:

Post a Comment