While meeting people on the river, I have come to realize
that fishermen are the kindest people out there.
Ron and I were fishing the green the other
day and a gentleman who had over ten years’ experience fishing the river began
telling us things he had learned over the years.
Besides things like what to use and what he’s
caught, he let us know a couple of good access points and good stretches to
try.
We had a couple of hours left to
fish before we needed to pack up camp so we quickly went and checked out one of
these stretches that he mentioned to us.
It was at the downstream side of one of the islands.
We could see some promising structure, shallow
areas with a seam going to the deep water.
Standing away from the seam where the shallow riffles
entered the deeper water so the trout wouldn’t spook, Ron cast the line into
the seam.
Within a couple of casts the
strike indicator twitched and he set the hook. I hurried over to help him net
the fish and realized my net was missing.
It is held onto my vest with a magnet but must have fallen off and
floated downstream. Ron was able to net
the fish himself, a nice broad shouldered rainbow.
After fishing the close water with a streamer and not
catching anything, and witnessing Ron’s success, I switched over to a nymph rig
as well.
I put on a size 18 red bodied
midge pattern with a peacock herl thorax and a size 16 emerging Baetis
pattern. These both seemed to do the
trick as I caught rainbows, cutthroat as well as whitefish with each of
them.
Together Ron and I caught about twenty fish that morning
before the wind picked up and made the casting miserable.
This was a great morning of successful
nymphing before heading back to take down camp and drive home.
