Turkey Fishing 2009
Some friends and I get together every spring for what we refer to as our annual Turkey-Fishing trip. We usually will spend the morning on a few of our days hunting spring gobblers in West Virginia, but this year the emphasis was on the fishing part of the trip.
As I drove into WVA that week I was greeted by flood warnings and enough brown water in the bottom land fields to make one think you should be seeing people in black pajamas planting rice. It was not pretty and didn't leave me hopeful that quality fishing was going to be very possible. Checking the weather forecast upon our arrival at base camp didn't provide any hope for improving conditions as rain was forecast for everyday of our trip. But, being unrelenting optimists, we planned our strategy and decided to fish the mountain streams on the East side of the state, hoping the higher elevations in the Potomac River watershed would provide some fishable water.
Our first stop was a tributary stream on the east side of Allegheny Mountain. The water was high but not unfishable and from past experience we knew the stream to be the home of lots of nice native Brook Trout and gone wild Rainbows that had last been stocked sometime in the 1930's.
We fished our way upstream, nymphing along, catching the occasional fish and in general have a good time in the woods. As I was re-tying a hares ear on the tippet, I happened to look upstream and my friend Kit was stripping out of his vest, shirt and rain jacket. It was pretty obvious he had been for a swim. Kit's a good cowboy though. He fell in to a relatively shallow area and managed to roll over quickly and only got his cloths wet down to the tops of his pockets. I lent him my fleece jacket and he hung his cloth out to dry (if you look close in one of the early shots in the slide show you can see his stuff hanging on tree branches).
As it turned out that was a relatively futile effort. About 45 minutes later we got hit with a pretty good rain shower. I was able to locate a rock house we could all huddle into and we waited out the storm for about an hour until we decided it wasn't doing to stop. So we sucked it up and got back to the truck and off to camp to dry out. We spend a couple of days fishing this area. My other buddy Jim got to fall in a creek and he wasn't as good a cowboy as Kit was. His baptism required a full change of clothes but other than getting wet, nor harm came to man or equipment. I began to refer to my partners as the "West Virginia Swim Team". After this minor misadventure we had a great dry fly day on these smaller fish and the rain held off until late afternoon. I had a wonderful time with a CDC caddis pattern shown to me by the boards very own John Scott (thanks John!).
We then headed to a managed stream in Pennsylvania for a few days. A good friend of ours runs this place just over the WVA boarder in PA and he kindly allows us to molest his trout. We had a great time there catching some really nice fish. Water conditions were still high but not unfavorable. I had a couple of great days with Olive Cone Headed Bunny Leeches and even managed to pick up a couple of Browns one day when the Hendrickson hatch was on. All things being equal it was just the trip I was hoping for. Great time with friends and a few fish mixed in to keep it interesting. Maybe next year we'll get the guns out again but I really enjoyed my week as a trout bum!
Attached is a slide show of our little adventure, enjoy!
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Thanks!
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West Virginia Swim Team
