The perfect olive day.

 Woke this morning to a nice steady rain.  Not the kind that blows out the rivers in less than an hour but the kind that soaks in and replaces what the sun removed from the soil during the scorching days of July and August. An olive day if I ever saw one.  Unable to work outside I spent the morning tying iso emergers and flomps (floating nymphs).  Also tied up some white flies.  Have a box of them from over thirty years ago when I fished the Salmon River, Fish Creek and the West Canada Ephron hatches. Even I have to admit that I tie a better fly now than I did then. With the flies tied and nothing else to do  I even oiled the hinges on my olive and iso boxes so I could quickly replace flies destroyed by hungry trout (just think about that for a minute before you go out to the garage for the oil can). By 1:00 I was ready to go.

At 6:15 I had seen more deer and almost as many eagles as I had olives and isos.  Saw three trout free rise and four trout that came to my fly. The only one that ate was a 15 inch hatchery fish that was one of the three trout I had seen rise.  There were simply no bugs or rising fish anywhere I went.  Stops included BR, WB, EB, and BK.  Simply stated, I was working my tail off and neither the bugs nor the fish were doing their part.

With my tail between my legs I headed back to camp. Stopped at Junction Pool just for a look (I know, you say, "This is where the SOB  walks into a river full of ravenous trout and kills it").  No, there were three cars in the parking lot and the fog was so thick that I couldn't see the river, let alone where the fishermen were.  I left.

It was 6:30 when I found a river where I could see the water through the fog. It's raining and getting darker by the minute.  Waded out with the raincoat under the vest (you know the routine) but when it started to pour,  I said at least keep your vest dry and waded back to shore and put the damp vest under the raincoat. Waded back out into a moderately heavy rain and saw some Ephrons trying to stay airborne, put one on and made several casts towards the "black water" side so I could at least see the fly, and lo an angel came in the form of a brilliantly colored 19 inch rainbow and ate my fly. (If that's not a run on sentence there will never be one, Mrs. Haskins forgive me for what I've done).     

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