Walk Away Joe.

 

Once again my efforts this morning resulted in the netting of but one fish, however, things were a lot different from my previous forays. For one thing, there were bugs hatching, not a good hatch of anything, but caddis, cornuta, isos and gray foxes enough to get fish up and feeding. Broke off two big fish, (when I say big, it's a fish of at least 17 inches and these two qualified easily), one on the strike when his head and shoulders came out of the water going away from me. The second was a hot 'bow who broke the knot between the leader (mono) and the 5x flora carbon when I failed to clear the line and it caught on the reel handle. Might have muttered the third most used word by fishermen, just after intermittent and sporadic.

Now the good part, the refusals. I know, refusals are like track soup to a deer hunter, but that pesky NW wind was blowing straight upstream, and I had chosen  to fish a run where there were four separate channels of water each with much slower moving water in between. It's always a challenge to get a drag free float of any length there. With the wind, forgetaboutit. In my mind the dozen refusals that my flies got were high praise from the fish.

With another cold night forecasted I left the storms on the windows and took a nap. Replaced and repaired iso's, tried to fix my printing problem, (printer will print a test page on command from the PC, but does not appear to receive and will not print anything else).

At 6:00pm I said screw it, (a carpentry term), and headed out to see if I could find my mojo. Found a fishable hatch of Invaria on the WB and waded into a pool that receives more than it's share of pressure, (no, not the red barn). Found fish willing to eat my flies, and on two occasions, fish willing to eat the fish that had eaten my fly. 

The fishing was enjoyable, the fish were hard to fool, lots of ignores and refusals but enough fish ate my flies that it was a good night. Most fish were in the 12/14 inch size range. A 17 inch brown was fish of the day.

May is in the books. For me it was a very good month. Just sayin', the difference between a fish hooking frenzy and having to work for them is where you are fishing. Walk away from the parking lot and things get a lot easier.