Getting back on the Trout

There's been a lot of travel this past year--business travel. Much of it has been a long way from home waters. I tried to learn to catch subtropicals but I have a lot to learn. Meanwhile I felt spring coming on and the need to catch trout simply rose.

Last year, the late winter was in some ways the most interesting gratifying period in trout hunting. The only people oh the stream in Feb and early March are die-hards. All the fish you are cating to are veterans. They'e been in the stream for at least 4 months instead of 4 days. They may have been caught.

But Spring is, well, Spring. It gets urges to be outside moving involuntarily. Is this an echo of our protohuman past? Whether it is or not, I felt the increasing need to prove to myself that my 8 hours in the late winter were not in vain--that I had not forgotten how to catch trout, in 8 months away.

The first hookup did not get on film. It was the day after opening day. That can be a madhouse second only to opening day itself. And in a class III TMA, it is very busy. But in the afternoon in a particular run, there was nobody there, so I went with a friend who was doing this for the first time in decades.

It is a location I've caught a few trout in before--as well as bass in the late summer. This stream is strange because it can hold all sorts of fish. It has slow sections, marshy sections, fast plunging water, and muddy bottom sections. The water is from the bottom of a deep reservoir so never terribly hot until it gets to the sea.

The water this Spring has been very high. We finally turned the corner on the Drought of 2015. Many a rrrr

The next day I fished a class 3 WTMA and caught a stocked brown: