Last Cold Day

Sunday 1/15/17 met some friends on the river.  Walking in I think it was around 4 F.  I noted that driving up top my car thermister read close to double digits.  Down in the valley it was more like 3-4 F.  Possible instrument error involved; or maybe just cold settled in low.  With the rays at that angle we were somewhat chilled at extremities.  Watching a guy fish first hole standing still in the shade feet got numb.  We decided to walk upstream until we got into the sun, which we could see up the valley a ways.  Low temps are okay if the sun is striking face and the wind is down; we had both to our advantage on this morning.

Don't often fish with four guys; we ended up doing two pairs leap-frogging, with a sort of sub-leap-frogging individually within that framework.  The social and discussion component was about as big as the fishing piece.

We walked into a plague of small brown trout.  Absolute horde of them.  Even fishing smallish tandem rigs, you figure you'll run into some variability in size over the course of the day.  Between four guys we topped out around 12 inches.  Catching many fish.  Not sure just how many but in our pair, we had to be right around fifty; maybe more.  The 7-10 inch fish seemed to be everywhere.  I never did throw a streamer up and across; should have done it but to be honest we weren't fishing really hard and no one was too worried about it.  

Came down to drink.

This size class was the top for the day; we got a fair number of them.  Spring 2013 was a tough one; maybe that year class was beat down some.  Seems that would conincide approx with the fish that would now be four years old and maybe low to mid-teens.  Need to go look at the average size of the year classes.  I do know there is a strong relationship between peak spring flow and survivability of the respective year class.  It's not the summer floods that get them.

I trekked ahead for a ways in the afternoon and fished this water.  First the plunge upstream to the left out of the photo.  It produced a few fish.  But the deal was finding the giant pod in the flat water; in the pool belly below the main plunge and out of the faster current.  That pod was at 12 o'clock position relative to my buddy's orientation in the pic.  I stood about where he is standing; hack-flipped five points of weight into the flat water; let it all sink; twitched and got eats.  Before anyone caught up I counted eighteen to hand; again, all small fish.  I stopped and ushered in buddy who proceeded to catch another solid dozen in about twenty minutes.  We left the hole knowing we could have kept at it.  Winter nymphing often plays out as such.

Not sure on this plant specie but it was a cool visual; some sort of biblical image out on the roadless pathless floodplain.