Late Season Opportunities

While winter is rapidly approaching, the weather is still bi-polar.  The cold season has not yet arrived in force, meaning that one weekend is perfect with highs in the 60s on the plains and 50s in the mountains and the next weekend it snows with frigid overnight lows.  Last weekend was one of the good weekends, at least if you're an angler.  I made it to the mountains to a favorite stream to chase the browns.

Watching a fish get fired up over a streamer is one of my favorite aspects of the sport.  Accordingly, I headed to a stretch where I could toss some streamers and see what would happen.  In the first pool, I watched a fish shoot out of the back of the deepest part to attack my streamer.  Somehow it couldn't find the hook though.  Several casts later, with the fish repeating its behavior, I finally just gave up and moved to a different spot.  Sometimes fish just want to chase but not eat.

Over the next couple of hours, I covered a ton of water.  Several nice fish were out and about and a few smaller ones were even on redds.  The largest fish I saw made me gasp in amazement at how a fish of well over 20 inches could live in such small water.  In another spot, I watched a pod of big runner browns swimming in circles in a big pool, just waiting for the right moment to move up and spawn.

The fish that I hooked all wanted to attack whichever streamer I happened to have on at the moment.  Others had the same idea, but streamer fishing is not usually a high percentage game.  I generally expect a lot of follows, refusals, and the usual swing and a miss.  Enough fish found the hook though to keep me interested.

Later in the day, I moved on to a more sheltered stretch of stream and hoped for some blue-winged olives.  The hatch didn't develop, or perhaps I was too late.  A few stray midges were coming off, and I did trick one small brown on a midge, but that was it.  The consolation was a great sunset and beautiful reflected light on the stream.  I spent more time behind my camera lens than fishing during the late day hours...