Blow you Ole' Blue Norther -

 

It's been a long day. We had a gulley washer in Lafayette yesterday and I had to shovel the gravel off the inlet pipes of both the trout and bass ponds this morning. Fed the trout, who acted like it was the first day of summer vacation. After a week of over ninety degree temperatures the 58 degree air temp  and cold rain must have felt good to them.

The drive down was both windy and rainy with the car temp holding steady at 58 degrees all the way to Windsor. It warmed up to a high of 72 later in the day, but the back porch thermometer says it's back down to 58, (at 10:35pm). There had been no rain in Lordville so I was able to get right to the lawn which I didn't mow at all last week during the heat wave. Went inside to make lunch and found out that we had no power. With the number of dead ash trees, this is going to be an increasingly common event.

At 2:30 I made a sandwich, grabbed a diet Pepsi, got in the car and headed out to look for a place you could fish in gale force winds. The winds were from the North-West, and were as fierce as any I have bone fished in, broken branches littered the road and waves with whitecaps blew down the WB. Because of the high water temps in the BR and EB last week the only river I looked at was the WB. Although every river twists and turns, the WB basically flows west to east, and the wind knows this. It funnels it's energy right down the river. If you made a cast at the sewage treatment plant in Deposit, you would have had time to drive up to Wendy's, order the new gigundous , (grammarian, help me out here), triple thick burger, magnum fries with triple salt, and a small diet Coke, (you're wearing waders), and be back at the sewage treatment plant before the fly touched down.

If you're going to fish on a day like today, look for a place where there is a cross wind where you have some chance of getting a cast to at least land on the water. I drove to a "secret place", (let's just call it the RB), expecting there to be a Deposit cop directing traffic, the parking lot to be full, and anglers with any common sense at all lined up shoulder to shoulder, just to get out of the wind. ( Let me add here before someone says it, anyone with any common sense, stayed home). Not a single wade fisherman was there. The only boat; Adrian, with a sport who could cast in the wind. Both Adrian's sport and I caught fish, there were bugs and rising fish, the wind blew up stream and downstream, only rarely did the fly go where you intended, but it was fishable and fun. Adrian knew when it would end, I stayed an extra half hour and did nothing but fall in. Bruised a shin and I assume that's how I got a bruised knuckle on my pinkie, but my raincoat saved me. Wet only up to my elbows, no water in the boots, (vest and fly-boxes are another story.

At 6:00, I'm in the car with the heater on drying my shirt sleeves, at 6:30, (with the wind subsiding), I'm catching fish on Dorothea's, (the little summer sulfurs), that are racing up stream a good two weeks ahead of last year. The best part about fishing the summer sulfurs right now is that the fish haven't yet figured out that they too have hooks in them.

It was a better day of fishing than anyone could have reasonably expected.