EVENINGS ALONG THE STREAM (part 12)
| Sysadmin Note |
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| Part eleven can be found here |
July 3rd, the weather was pretty much a repeat of yesterday until the late afternoon with the clouds billowing up and darkening the sky causing a modest PMD spinner fall to occur around 4 p.m. After the mini spinner fall the skies cleared up and the winds came up placing a late evening spinner in jeopardy.
Neil showed up around 7 p.m. and the evening breezes failed to drop off completely, however a few spinners came down around 7:30 p.m. and a few fish rose to them and we manage to hook some of those trout before the feeding stopped and the water became quite. We quickly checked the upper end of the creek and, founding no action, we drove down to the house pond. Often you can find trout feeding in the house pond when there are no visibly trout feeding anywhere else on the creek.
As a point of information the house pond on DePuy's Spring Creek isn't really a pond at all, it is just a very wide section of the creek with slower current, heavy weed beds and very interesting wading. Early in the season I often use a float tube in the house pond and have used a boat for some of my clients. As the weed beds grow the currents of this flat smooth section of water can offer some of the most challenging fishing found anywhere on the creek.
When we arrived at the house pond there were several trout feeding, and as we watched the water and the rise forms we noticed that a few more spinners had fallen on the water, but we also noticed that some of the rise forms were not of a trout feeding in the film but rather some were feeding twelve to sixteen inches below the surface. We were using the same Parachute PMD Spinner that had worked earlier in the evening but to this we added a twelve inch dropper off the bend of the hook and tied on a size sixteen Miracle Nymph. This pattern is often used successfully as a midge worm or midge pupa imitation.
Again Neil and I enjoyed some reasonably good fishing with some of the trout taking the spinners while others took the Miracle Nymph, however the subsurface takes were very subtle and unless you were very intent on your dry fly you would miss the takes. I know this, as I missed several trout before I figured out what was going on and passed the information on to Neil. As the light was fading this added an additional aspect to the challenge of the evening.
On this evening Neil's hooking and landing abilities far exceed mine as he brought several nice trout to the net while I missed fish, broke off fish and lost them as they ran me through the weed beds.
We had come out to fish the spinner falls but had end up having the best fishing with midge imitations, and once again we fish late finally ending at 10:15 P.M. After gearing down we left the creek with "see you tomorrow" as are parting words.
After tonight's performance I knew that I was tired and needed to get a good night's rest. If my reactions are a bit off it doesn't affect my ability to guide, however if I'm fishing and my reactions are off, that means that many different thing can happen and most of them do not bode well.
So tonight my journal entries will be quick and to the point, with a note to add information in a day or so after contemplating the events of the evening.
| Sysadmin Note |
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| Part thirteen can be found here |