CNY Session Two
Despite a poor placement after my first session I was still confident with abilities after having fished a solid two hours in the morning. The first glances at my new beat seemed promising. Bad news for me was that the next to hours were going to end up being a complete grind. There were so many spots on the stream that should have held fish, but they didn’t. Now it is completely possible that there were fish there that I didn’t catch, though I did put up the highest number of fish of any of the four anglers who fished it that weekend.
As I failed to catch fish in spots I felt I should have, I began to mess with my rig; first by changing patterns and weights and then, finally, I cut off the extra tag and went back to fishing one fly again. Shortly thereafter I hooked and land a small wild brown that was 19 cm. The next cast I pulled an even smaller 16 cm brown out of the hole. My controller jokingly exclaimed that my fish was giant, though it was far from it. I was happy to get the two fish on the board, but I was well aware that it would take more than that to get the job done.
The hole above where I had just caught the other fish was gorgeous and I spotted a decent size sucker sitting along side the edge at the back of the pool. Since all fish counted I spent a few minutes sight fishing to it, however I was never able to get it to take. In that same run I rolled what I can only assume was a tiny trout and then didn’t touch another fish. Just a above that run, I waded into position on the right side of a big boulder and cast cross the stream to the far bank. A large boulder came down from the bank at a seventy-degree angle and into the water to create a slow seem next to the fast current. A few casts later my line went tight and when I set I didn’t see any fish. The fish stayed deep which usually pointed to a bigger fish. The brown ran me all over the pool before landing in the net and a nice fourteen-inch brown was the result.
I caught another fish in the same spot as that last brown and drifted a black wooly bugger under a overhanging tree to pick up another. By the time I reached the top two holes I had thirty minutes left on the clock. I started to wade into the hole until a fish came to hit a fly on the surface two feet in front of me. I took two steps back and two casts later I put the fish in the net. Right after the same situation happened again and this time I picked up a decent brown on the first cast. I caught another fish farther into the channel before moving up to the next run. I quickly picked up a fish at the bottom of the next run and then two more evenly spaced out in the middle and then at the top. Above that was a waterfall which had a really deep hole at the base, that looked ideal for trout, yet the few minutes I spent there were very unproductive.
I ended up finishing with eleven fish and took an even worse placing than the morning session. I was a touch bummed, but again I still felt I fished well. Like I said earlier I ended up putting the highest fish count caught on that beat all weekend, so clearly my beat was unfortunately not of the same quality as the others. After that I fished two of the worst lake venues I have ever fished and did not catch a single fish all day. Oh well I guess! I enjoyed my two stream sessions and I felt that I fished consistently which is not something I always do.