Well, at least I can say it was a nice day

I was amped to fish today. It was supposed to be a high of 55 degrees, and I was going to meet my stepdad and fish all afternoon up at the Little Lehigh. Well, he wound up not being able to make it so I started off fishing solo, and then ran into a buddy of mine who joined me for a few hours.

The first time I ever fished the Salmon River in NY and met Melinda at her fly shop in Altmar, she told us that she could always tell the guys from PA because they always wore camo. I had a camo knit hat on that day. Busted. When I got to the water today, I started laughing because she nailed it. The stream was full of the camo wearing crowd, many even with their bright orange vests. I think it was most likely the guys who were out of deer tags and decided that since it was nice they would try fishing instead of hunting. Needless to say, the fish were very pressured. People were hitting just about ever hole and trout were darting up and downstream all afternoon.

I fished for two solid hours without a single hit. A few guys I talked to said they got 1 or 2, but they were earlier in the morning, and they were on size 24 and 26 black midges. The ones I tied last night were 22s and the fish weren't having it. I saw swarms of midges flying around but no rises. The fish were aggresively feeding towards the bottom, but they didn't like what I was offering.

With no luck on midges, eggs, or nymphs, I started moving to bigger things. San Juan worms, nothing. Slumpbusters, nada. Finally I threw on a glass bead woolly bugger I tied very sparse with a black dubbed body and thin dry fly hackle and started reach casting across stream and stripping from one bank to the other. That paid off and I landed a nice 13 inch wild brown trout. I would have loved to post a picture of that fish, but I was upgrading the OS on my i-phone tonight and it wiped out ALL of my pictures. I'm upset about losing the fish pic, but more upset about all the awesome shots of my son at Christmas.

I absolutely hate my i-phone since upgrading to OS4. If you have similar pains, this video will crack you up.



I was sick of all the camo wearing weekend warriors getting snagged in trees and wading in the non-wading section to retrieve their Wal-Mart flies, so I moved a mile or so downstream and fished some water I haven't fished in about a year. The sun started to set and with no more hits and only one fish siting, I called it quits. At least I avoided the skunk and had a nice day on the water. Fishing with only a sweatshirt and jeans on during this time of year is awesome.

In other news, looks like our next trip to the Salmon River is happening in two weeks. We did 3 trips in 2010 and I got the skunk on two of them. To be fair, the 2nd trip was during the big flood and it's not fun to land a King Salmon with a river running at 25,000 CFS. With less pressure and fresh Steelhead in the water, we should hopefully do ok.

My Steelhead box got pretty wiped out during our two later trips last year and I'm going to spend the next two weeks stocking it back up with more black stones, eggs, and sucker spawns. I definitely lose a ton of flies there bottom bouncing, and I feel that tying for a steelhead trip is definitely quantity over quality. Keep it bright colors with some contrast, or some solid black. It's a work in progress, but here's a pic of what it currently looks like.



Expect a lot more updates and patterns over the next few weeks. I'm going to start tonight on some BFS (big #*%#ing stoneflies).