Fishin' Fridays

[Bucky]

This year, my buddy Eric and I have decided to institute a weekly fishing outing, where we leave the office early on Friday and hit up one of the local rivers for a few hours. This was the first week of our Fishin Fridays, and it was exactly what we needed. Now, we were only able to get out for a little under two hours, but the weather was perfect and we had a little luck fishing. We had both been on a streak of getting skunked (if not every time out, most of the recent times out).

We decided to fish between two of the lower dams today, as neither of us had ever fished that stretch. The river was pretty brushy with a few overhanging trees where we entered, but cleared up overhead a short way up. We found a good looking seam along some overhanging brush, and took turns casting to it. I was fishing a beadhead pheasant tail behind a hopper, and he was fishing a gold ribbed hares ear off a hopper. He had the first few casts and didn't see any activity. Then I took a few casts. On about my third cast, I missed my target, but ended up on the seam away from the brush. As the hopper drifted past a submerged boulder, it dove under, and I set the hook. I could see the whitish yellow flash underwater and some weight behind it. After a 20 second fight, I had a beautiful ~13 inch brown trout in the net. It was probably the biggest fish I have caught out of this particular river, so my day was made.

About twenty minutes later, we came to the bottom of a riffle system with a couple boulders. Eric took the left side of the river, and I took the right, as both had beautiful looking hiles and seams. I threw a cast or two in the direction of a bright yellow-orange trout (they stock albino rainbows in this river) to see if I could get him to take. I was soon hooked on a submerged stick, and had to retrieve my fly. As I removed the fly from the stick, I heard my buddy give a shout of excitement. I looked over and he was working in a brown. He quickly landed it and had it in hand. The trout was about 9 inches, and the lateral spots were very bright red. A beautiful fish.

I landed one more shortly thereafter, and we had to call it a day in order to make a prior engagement. It was a great day on the water, as we both got the skunk off our back, enjoyed some beautiful weather and some beautiful fish. Can't wait until the next Fishin' Friday excursion.