Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Hitting the small stuff

Chris and I made plans a few weeks back to go out and fish some little streams we'd been talking about for some possible brookies. 

"Finally, BROOKIES!", is what my 3 wt would say if it could talk.  The poor thing has been through a lot with those big wild trout in the NEK.  Of course, I'm not complaining, it is engraved in my mind and I'll never forget the experiences I've had this Spring.

So the days prior to our trip, there was quite a bit of rain.  All of the main rivers and even some of the bigger streams were pretty high.  We finally found some lower water with much better clarity after driving for a while.  The rain we were getting turned into snow on the mountains, and the high visibility made for an epic view. 


After soaking up the scenery, we hit the water.  It was water neither of us had really fished before, so we had our fingers crossed it held brookies.  It wasn't as gradient as normal brookie water but we figured we'd try it since we have caught fish in the lower section, and the water we could see looked very promising.   We fished it for about an hour before realizing they were most likely not in this section if stream, I think there just wasn't enough cover for them to be comfortable holding.  We got back in the car and headed upstream. 

On our way to the next stream we noticed what looked like a big beaver dam - we hopped out and started hiking through the marshy area to get to the beaver pond.  It was chalk full of chubs and got pretty deep in some places - probably 5-6 feet.  Seemed like there were no brookies in this beaver pond, but it was worth a try!  We checked out higher upstream of the previous stream and things still didn't heat up.  We gave up on the stream and got the map out in the car and decided on our next location.  A stream that was relatively close.  We arrived and the stream looked great in terms of clarity, maybe even too clear. We took off and fished separate directions and both ended up coming back to where we started an hour later and had no action....on to the next one!

Back to the map it was!  This time we were heading to some bigger water with some very nice looking falls.  The only thing was that it hadn't cleared up and lowered as much as the streams around it.  It was quite high and the clarity was less than ideal.  We fished it anyway, hoping for one of those dirty-water big browns....no such luck!

We headed back to the lower section of the first stream we fished - it looked pretty high in the morning when we got there so we didn't fish it.  It had gone down a little, so we opted to fish it.  Clarity was good, but was a bit higher than I'd like.  Nonetheless, Chris managed to hook up first into a great looking wild bow, probably 11-12".  He opted for no picture and released the fish, things were looking better. 

Shortly after, it was my turn at landing a fish, this time a beautiful brown!!


Afer the brown, things died down.  Two decent sized fish from the same pool....good enough for us!

The day ended and we were happy to wash the skunk off.  Even if we did get skunked, the scenery alone was worth making the trip.

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