Sincere thanks to all who posted on yesterday's blog.

Usually I'm careful about not naming specific pools where I fish. Wednesday I fished three pools on the Willow and BK. Let me be clear, the pools are not a secret. What was unusual was that the puddles in the  Hazel Bridge parking lot were gin clear, there were no cars or fishermen at Cairn's pool (thanks Chris Z.), and but one angler at Cemetery. So I screwed up and named the pools. Thursday with a 10/15 mph north wind blowing, I opted to forgo the BR and try to find a protected pool somewhere along the BK.  Exited 17 at Cook's Falls and drove up to Cemetery and there was hardly room to turn around in the parking lot. Not saying it had anything to do with the days blog post but I turned around and did a pool hop down the river. In the five pools I stopped at I saw a total of one other angler. The number of fish feeding (there was a fair hatch of the usual fall bugs) in the pools I stopped at were : 0, 1, 1, 0 and several. Spent quite a bit of time in the last pool after hooking and losing a nice rainbow, only to find that many of the "several" risers were fall fish (caught two of them).

Today with the wind laid down I was back on the BR in a pool farther downstream than the one I fished earlier in the week. Fished 2:00 until 6:00. There were pseudos hatching on arrival and the rest of the fall bugs thereafter. Had hooked 8 fish before I saw the first rise to something besides my fly. After that about half the fish I hooked were ones I saw rise. This time there were some browns in the mix, all two or three year olds. The bows were mostly all three year olds now about 17 inches. Lost a third of the fish hooked and didn't once utter the universal frustrated fisherman's cry of frustration, "excrement."

The outlook - Trying to be real here. If you are new to the BR and are new to blind casting, you will not hook a bunch of fish. But if you go back to the no kill, you won't either. The BR is easily wadeable at current levels and Dennis has been good enough to point out in one of his more recent comments, several places where you can access it. It's a beautiful river, the water is, despite the current conditions in the WB, quite clear and if you ever happen to have a BR 'bow eat your fly, you'll be hooked.      

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