I've had better things to do.

If you've been paying attention you already know, my heart wasn't really in it this week.  Fished only the evening hatch on Monday and Tuesday, gave it the full shot on Wednesday, then took a personal day on Thursday and found better things to do until about 4:30 today.  

Why?  Pretend we are in the locker room after the second period of a hockey game.  The first period was the big bugs, the second period was the sulfurs and the third period is fall fishing. I love to fish, never get tired of it but deep down I just know sulfurs are over and the third period hasn't started yet. 

Went out today with low expectations, yes there was an increase in the flows from yesterday's rain but the freestone water temps have been in the high seventies this week and it was a warm rain. To jump start fall fishing we need more rain, cold nights and a few cloudy overcast drizzly days. On the other hand you just never know what you will run into on the river.

It being the last week of August, my vest has been relieved of two of the three boxes of sulfurs but has had Ephrons, tricos and ants added to it.  Ephrons (white flies) are warm water flies that hatch in incredible numbers on many freestone streams. They hatch, molt, mate and die all within two hours in the evening just before dark. Tricos are the early morning spinner fall.  Ants are today's enigma, you never know when or where they will appear. Some say the day after a late August rain and today they were right.

The fishing - If this were the early sixties it would have been great day.  By today's standards, not so much.  Why? There were ants, lots of them and I got there just when they starting to hit the water and the fish were on them. Being generous, the little red ants that covered the water were no bigger than a size forty.  My smallest ants are twenty-twos. If you were able to glue 20 of the floating ants to a hook it would still be about half the size of my smallest ant. Fish seem to be able to zone in on the tiniest of objects to the exclusion of all else. They did that today.  Most (if not all) of the rising fish were yearlings. They wouldn't give my ant a look. Dug through my tiny fly, fly box and found something from my San Juan trip, clipped off as much fur and feather as I could and used it to catch a good number of 1960's fish. There was fierce competition for fish of the day with a 10.10 incher nosing out a 9.8 incher.

Did I have fun?  Yes, I was alone on a beautiful pool with rising fish all around me.  I usually don't try to catch yearlings. Today that's all there were and the rises in the faster water (which was the only place I could get them to eat) were a real challenge to even see.  When I hooked the 9.8 incher I thought for a moment I had a "good one" and when the 10.10 incher hit just before dark, I actually netted it.

 

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