Solstice

Nothing spectacular, but I had the time.  It was solstice, and it was in the low thirties, but I decided to head south to a spring branch an hour and a half from the house.  It’s liberally stocked with rainbows and browns, and winter is the catch-and-release season here, plus the spring water is 58 degrees, warmer than the water of the main river, and smallmouth, rock bass, and other assorted warm and coolwater species move up into the branch for the winter.  There’s a decent chance of catching a bigger-than-average smallmouth.

The water was, naturally, extremely clear, and the first fish I caught was a rock bass of six or seven inches, which rocketed up from deep within a weedbed to inhale a small wooly bugger.  I hooked a few trout, mostly on WD-40’s and caddis pupae stripped under the surface. 

Over a mile and a half of public access, two cars in the parking lot, and a pair of jokers still managed to set up and begin fishing all of fifteen feet off my right shoulder, spooking the pod of fish I was working.  He’d start there and work his way downstream until I’d hook or snub a fish, then would saunter back up to me and do the same beat, over and over again, ten or fifteen times.  Finally he went downstream and waded across, then came back upstream and started off directly in front of me, ensuring every fish which could possibly see my fly was thoroughly spooked.   Fucker.  I wandered off.

Had a decent smallmouth chase a white streamer farther downstream, but no take.  Other than that things were awfully slow.  Biggest excitement was an undersized, mangy looking deer which didn’t much care about my presence, so I wandered up and took some photos.  Other than that, a muskrat, a bald eagle, and some mink shit, nothing too terribly eventful.

I wound up back where I started and the pool was vacant.  Hooked a decent trout on a small parachute emerger in the surface film, and out of nowhere my friend popped back out and began doing the same thing.  Disgusted, I went and ate a late lunch.

I couldn’t bring myself to seriously fish any more, I was so ticked.  I mulled around and watched fish sip midges, cast to a few, rose none.  No trout to hand, just some goggle-eye, striped shiners, and something big and ugly whose identity is unknown to me.