Sometimes bigger isn't better.

Will it ever rain again?  The part of the lawn  I've been working on (seeding and watering) is growing while the backyard looks like the Sahara desert.  Refused to be lured into morning or early afternoon fishing. Fishermen have been as thick as maggots on a road kill on the UE above Shinhopple. I had trouble catching fish there before the crowds arrived I've no need to put my shortcoming on display.

 Left camp about 4:00 and headed to the UE, with contingency plans to either fish the WB down around the game lands or hit the BR about 6:30 and hope for a late hatch of olives.  Down below Shinhopple, away from the crowd, I found a pool with no fishermen in it that I've fished four times this year. To better understand fishing the UE you need to see my catch figures for the four previous trips: 0, 0, 22 (and they were mostly big fish)  and 4.

The fishing:  The UE is now at 130 CFS.  It was somewhere between difficult and impossible at 180 CFS.  There were pseudos and isos on the water and a good number of fish rising. Never saw an iso dun touched (even the ones flapping their wings and hopping up and down trying to get airborne -  the fish just know). Fished an array of small olives and emergers and actually got fish to eat.  They weren't big (all  but one were between 11 and 12 inches) but they were beautiful wild browns (the ones with the big red spots).  It was finesse fishing and I never gave a thought to leaving for one of my contingency plan spots. Reeled it in about 7:00 and headed for the car shaking like a leaf from standing waist deep in the ice cold UE water.  On the walk back upstream I saw a fish rise 30 feet out from shore (this is where he catches a monster 20 inch brown that "makes" his" day). Wrong! The 16 inch hatchery brown with not a pectoral fin to his name came up and ate my fly.  Should he be fish of the day?  Perhaps, but I give my vote to one of the 12 inchers.

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