May 24, 2020 – Had a Feeling but Definitely Lost Faith for a Minute – Northampton County Limestoner

Thick, yo!

After landing one decent and a couple small wild browns early, like 6:30 AM today, and then very little for the next 45 minutes, even in a couple honey holes, I was thinking thank goodness for stocked rainbows, especially from 8 to 10 AM, when I was able to catch a good run of 5 or 6 fish in a row.  The creek I was fishing this morning gets pounded, which is part of the reason I was here so early (well, that and quarantine insomnia), but the early bite is not a bad one as we get into early summer/late spring patterns.  It is light enough to fish at 5:30 AM, so the nymphing can be solid even before 6.  I have a love/hate affair with this particular creek.  It is home to my white whale, for one (link).  It is a puzzle, and some talented fisherman I know concur with me, so I am confident that I am not alone in this complicated relationship.  It is a class A wild brown trout creek, but it also gets a heavy stocking of rainbows, sometimes the odd club brook trout too.  I have thought a lot about why the wild fish can be so dickish, but I will not bore you with a full treatise.  What keeps me coming back is this challenge and the possibility of landing a few fish each year like the one pictured in this blog several times.  I fish this stream close to ten times a year, and I don’t forget the good days or the beat downs.  I expect a good day when I land a couple early like today because it means I am doing something right, or the wild fish are feeling cooperative, but that luck can quickly turn too.  

Lower flows but stained.  Pink bomb delivers.  Consolation rainbows.

Thankfully, the water and bug life are good quality, so fish holdover multiple years, some of them getting quite large in the process.  Case in point, I had not been to this creek since January 31 of this year, and I only caught two fish that day, not all that odd in winter, but one of them was a good rainbow, pushing 17 inches and wide.  No wild browns at all that day, however, not a one.  On days like that, I am thankful for the bows, and I was starting to come to terms with that this morning, but I stuck with it and fished hard even when my confidence began to wane.  I fished the mono rig again this morning, and I fished a couple of Eric’s flies before I hung them up, including the pink bomb, which produced a handful of bows, but the big old wild brown took a newer confidence bug, the size 16 pheasant tail with the fuzzy collar and pink bead, aka pinky. 

A couple 8 or 9 inch wild browns for comparison....

I could not believe my luck when I arrived to an empty lot a little before 6 AM, so I made a beeline for the stretch of water where I came close to landing a massive wild brown a couple years ago.  I also hooked and lost another pig a couple years before that in a prime deep run just upstream (perhaps the same fish), so the browns in this section are drawing on a good gene pool.  Case in point, in the same pocket water where I landed a good fish today, I have landed at least two fish close to 20 inches over the last 5 years.  Today, I caught a good 11-inch brown that escaped a photo and then two 9 inchers before I ran into the rainbows.  It was cloudy and cool to start, but even though the creek had a stain from recent rains, the flows were not up at all.  The creek was actually a bit lower than I like, but the stain and the clouds helped with covering my approach.  Granted, I quit before 11 AM when I started seeing a couple more fishermen waking up, but I did not see many caddis before then, certainly not enough to provoke any risers.  I mentioned that I had not slept well, wide awake at 3 AM, so I was a little rough to start: a bad knot, an unusable photo or two of my first couple of fish, a few snags on industrial type things that tend to be less courteous than normal rocks and sticks.  All it took was getting my bugs eaten a few times to wake me up, however, and I got with the program eventually.  When it mattered, I was solid, at least.

Girthy

After working through some holes with only the one decent brown, the little guys, and several consolation bows to show for it, I fished some pocket water for the last hour on the water.  The water is shallower here, but it is bouncy enough to hold fish, big fish when the conditions are right.  I landed one nice rainbow in a deeper pocket, but this big brown was probably in 18 inches of water and in the seam nearest to me as well.  I basically hooked the fish at the end of my rod, while I was fishing close to me before stepping further in to target what I thought was an even better looking seam on the other side of the riffles.  I am glad I did not decide to step in here before fishing it, a good habit I practice almost automatically these days.  You can probably appreciate the girth from the shot that opens this post.  He was not as long as he could have been for such a big fish, just over 18 inches, I bet, but he was so thick that I had a hard time deciding how to photograph.  I had a deep net, so he stayed submerged while I figured it out for a minute.  A couple shots in the net, two lifts above the net with a burst of shots, and I had to call it good.  I am happy with a few of the shots, and they each highlight something different (plus there was not much other content today!) so I share a few of them here. 

The long view (that tail still wanting to go).

I just snuck out in the morning, leaving a note for Tami at the coffee pot, since I had not planned on fishing today (unless Eric was free to hit our little spot) so I decided to quit a few minutes later and spend some time with the family this afternoon.  I could spy three dudes, perhaps two and a guide above me, and another dude downstream, so I did not have high hopes of finding real estate if I did drive to another spot or two.  A nap sounded good as well.  Add one more episode to the ongoing story of me and this creek.  Today was one of the uplifting chapters, and there will be more of them, as surely as there will be more tragic ones in the future!

He's got good genes, this guy.