mlk weekend.

Air temperatures were above freezing for the first time  in two weeks, and the four to six inches which had been hanging around on the landscape retreated, holding on only on the north slopes and ditch bottoms, under cedar trees and clinging to steep bluffs.

 

I had been invited to a friend’s cabin, about a half hour from a very popular Ozark spring branch.  The good-weather weekend brought anglers out of the woodwork, and finding a spot with any decent fish and some relative solitude was damn near impossible.  It didn’t help that there were eight or ten people I already knew there with me.

 

I got out Friday afternoon and fished.  Second cast produced a solid 17 inch rainbow, but I LDR’ed it at five feet, fumbling for the camera.  I did get to touch its caudal peduncle, though, and it was a pretty fish.

Next cast produced a chunky footlong smallmouth, who rose up three feet from the bottom to smack at my mohair leech.  The smallie fishing was far more consistent than the trout, and I wound up with three more, the biggest around fifteen inches.  I did see a few bigger fish deep down in the slower holes, and a few were probably in the three to four pound range- solid fish.  Although they’d move for the leech, they wouldn’t accept my offering, and I couldn’t convince them with larger flies. 

I met up with Jake around three, and he fished upstream, catching a few fish on nymphs in a shallow riffle.  I wandered up there later in the afternoon and caught another rainbow, fifteen or sixteen inches, on a small orange egg.

 

Around dark the two of us headed back to the cabin, started a bonfire, and drank far too much.

 

************************

 

An early-morning hurt combined with a slew of eggs, potatoes, and sausage meant we didn’t get on the water until eleven in the morning.  I again caught got into a big rainbow within my first ten minutes on the water, and was content with the fish.  Caught a few rock bass, and hooked three or four more smallmouth before lunch.  I spent a bit of time below the suspension bridge, hooked two, but it was crowded and I got bored quickly.

 

Walked upstream with Jake to the same riffle as the night before, and caught three in quick succession, one on an egg, another two swinging mohair leeches through the fast water.  Nothing really huge, all the fish were around fifteen or sixteen inches, and gorgeously colored.  I did hook a bigger fish, nineteen or twenty inches, but the hook pulled out during a head-shake.  It was a pretty fish too, and Jake got a nice video of it.