I had a beautiful day of fishing on Sat and I just got to tell somebody about it!

I made it out to the Blue Ridge in Va this weekend to do some trout fishing. I've only been fishing since last summer, so a lot of my trips to that area still include a lot of reconnaissance. After checking out a stocked lake and deciding that I didn't want to fish shoulder to shoulder with the powerbait crew, I headed down the road and checked out a few holes in a stocked stream that had nobody on it. I spotted a nice pool from the road and got out to check it out. There was a number of fish in the pool, with a few in the around 10". I could see that they were feeding along the bottom so I ran back to the truck, rigged up my rod and tried a little nymphing. Long story short...I tried every nymph in my box and anythiing that even looked cloes to a food pellet to no avail.

Since I had another stream in mind that I wanted to check out, I moved on. The stream I was heading to is in a wilderness area and would require some hiking. I had some lunch at the trail head, got out the gear and headed up the trail. I ran into another fly fisher in the first 1/4 mile and kept heading upstream. I found some nice pools and stopped to fish them. For some reason, I thought I had several EHCs in my box but only had two...figured I'd have to be careful. Of course I lost the first one on a backcast into some branches after only five minutes. I tied on the second one and caught 3 nice size brookies in the next four pools with a couple of little ones along the way.

Moving up the stream kept bringing me to nice pools with a variety of features and many with a decent area for casting. I ended my trip on the stream at a beautiful waterfall as the sun was going behind the ridge. I rested there before turning downstream for the mile and a half hike out.

I hope that I'm not the only one who had a great weekend of fishing! So, where'd you all fish and how'd it go?

Charlie

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day...teach a man to fish and he'll never want to work again."