It's Not Always Easy Being Me!

 

It's 7:00 pm, and it's raining. It's a gentle rain with little or no wind, the kind I enjoy fishing in, and here I am typing a fishing report. Why? The Chiropractor just may have overdone the stretching of my pulled groin muscle yesterday and the groin muscle took it out on me last night. Fell asleep at eleven and was up again at one-thirty. Don't think I slept a wink after that. I'm tired.

The new dehumidifier is hard at work down in the basement where it has lowered the humidity from a somewhat sticky 86 to 60 since nine this morning. The old dehumidifier gave me no trouble going up the stairs and is resting in the car, (told him his next stop was Arizona where he would have little or no work to do and could enjoy retirement. He might well be pissed when I drop him off at the Hancock transfer station.

Left the estate at 1:30, (Jean, I remembered to bring my wallet, and filled the car up with gas in Hancock). Drove my usual circuit including the round trip to Sherman Creek. Never saw a rise until I arrived at the "Barking Dog" ramp. There were some Dorotheas hatching there and a few fish feeding. I'm not fond of crowds so I walked downstream to the 17 pool, (it's always been a great pool, holds a lot of fish, but on foot it's hard to get to). Arrived to find  three boats anchored and at least fourteen people in the water. On the way down I encountered one rising fish who kept on rising while I threw at him at least two dozen times. He would eat a fly, then move to a different lie, (one of four), and rise again. I made good drag free casts, some over the wrong lie for sure, but not once did he come close enough to my fly to count it as a refusal. Tipped my cap, (should have done so much sooner), and continued my journey to the 17 pool.  Keeping in mind that I have waded at least a quarter of a mile in what, this year, was a fairly decent sulfur hatch, and have seen but one riser, and now encounter enough boats and anglers to catch and deport all the brown trout in the pool, I was MORE THAN ELATED to see three different fish make those tiny little swirls that I did so well on last Friday. Alas, they didn't even give me a sniff. Two hours of fishing and not so much as one refusal.

The Rest of the Story -  Regular blog readers know I've been teasing Jim N., who ties really beautiful, artistically designed flies. Last editors meeting he gave everyone there some. I do not fish with someone else's flies, not that mine are so good, it's that everyone else's are better and I don't want to hurt my own feelings. "You'd catch more fish if you learned to tie better flies," said dear departed friend Les Gillette, god rest his soul. Anyway, with the hatch about over I was frantically searching for something else to throw at the SOB's, and out of a seldom used pocket in my vest came a little round box of Jim N's flies. Picked out what is probably intended to look like a sulfur, shrugged my shoulders, and tied it on. THERE IS NOT A WORD OF A LIE IN WHAT HAPPENED NEXT. With no bugs on the water and not one trout rising, I made less that five casts and the GD fly was eaten by a very nice rainbow. The fish came unstuck. Two casts later another fish ate the fly, a 16 inch brown. Within five minutes a 17 inch rainbow inhaled the fly, and before the elderly gentleman, (probably at least 75), who was wading up the shore got by me, another 16 inch brown ate it. Not wanting to be embarrassed further, I cut the fly off and put on one of my isos, (when I was almost back to the car, a very nice 13 inch brown ate it). 

Note to Jim N. - My new fly, still in the early development stage, never got a sniff. 

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