Euronymphing a failure, but a good day.
Jan 28, 2023 10:30:58 GMT -6
gui, turfdawg, and 1 more like this
Post by jonbo on Jan 28, 2023 10:30:58 GMT -6
I fished on Thursday, the 26th. I started at Cardiac Hill (Spillway Creek), tight-lining. I used my, you know, 35 ft MacCham, Amnesia, sighters, etc. euro-nymph combo rig. No love, at all. I fished with a caddis larva, a mayfly larva, an egg pattern, a Pat's, and a "jonbo" larva thing I made to look like the little worms (caddis?) that I occasionally retrieve in Spillway from a piece of creek grass or a trout's gullet. Most of the time I had an RS2 dropper for mid-water attraction. Nothing, zilch, nada. I don't know if it was me, I don't know how to euro right (quite possible), the fish were in pockets I didn't explore, or the fish were just particularly sulky that morning. I know, Spillway Creek is fished out. Don't go there! (Unless you're Gui or David. They seem to know how to fish it.) I'll tell you what. It's pretty tiring for a geezer. Still I insist on trying to fish it. Donno why. Stubbornness?
So then, after a nice brief visit with Ms Roberta at the Fly Shop, and lunch of a Payday and some bagged popcorn, I hit the Evening Hole. I began with a standard bobber and a regular old flashback pheasant tail that had been in my box forever. Quickly I caught 3 decent trout. I think these were at the top of Hickory Hole and the bottom of EH. I moved upstream to a flat I like. I saw some kind of surface activity. I put on a BWO-like RS2 that normally works well for me in these situations. Nothing. Mighta' got one tug. So then, I pulled out the aquarium dip net I sometimes carry with me and strained the surface film for a couple of minutes to see what they were feeding on. Well, I caught a very small, maybe size 18 caddis-looking adult. I don't know what it was. It was brown. It looked like a caddis, maybe. It was actually shaped a lot like a stonefly, but much too small. I'm calling it a caddis. I also, though, caught several of the emergers. They were little brown wormy things with little brown bits hanging out, shucks, I suppose. They seemed to have wings and legs trying to come out. They were ugly as sin wiggling in the net. They were about size 18 or 20.
I looked in my caddis compartment. I found a caddis emerger I had tied several years ago for a hatch on the Lil' Mo' River that someone was calling "little black caddis", I think. It was about size 18, tied LaFontaine style, if you know what that is. I had put some black in it, so it was probably dark enough for this hatch, though not brown. I'll tell you, tied by me, it was ugly enough for these, and kind of stringy-looking. I don't think until that day it had ever caught anything. I had nearly thrown it out several times, but for some reason kept it. I tied it on, also a brown zebra midge (tiger midge?) in about a 20. I swung this team I'd concocted in the current. Well, bam, bam, bam, bam! Mikey, they liked it! (Both flies). I caught about a dozen fish in about 30 minutes. They were all small, maybe 8 to 11 inches. About half were brownies. They were the smallest. I might have caught a 12 inch rainbow in there. Have they stocked a batch of little browns, recently?
Anyway, after some work, and clumsiness, it turned out to be a good day of fishing. Thank you, Lord, for good fishing (also the LMF Foundation). Jonbo, out.