January 29th: Just one more cast...

Checked the weather report for today and saw that it was going to be warm in the morning then cool down during the day. Sounded like a perfect morning for an early fish. Woke up and was stream side around 7:30 this morning. Weather was hanging in the mid 30's with a cold mist coming down. Made for really cold hands. Started out on a downstream stretch of easement that I hadn't fished before. Wasn't to thrilled about what I saw to begin with, lots of sand and shallow runs. Couple decent pools here and there. Hooked onto a nice 14-15" brown in one of the deeper holes.

From there I drove upstream some more and fished another easement. Nothing that great besides the pool under the bridge. Caught 5 in there with the spinner and spent some time with the fly rod but was unsuccessful. 

I had around an hour left after I fished the second easement so I drove up near the headwaters to the last easement on the stream. This stretch ended up being packed with trout. Nearly every step I took, fish bolted off upstream into the next run or pool. Caught 8 trout in short order including this colorful fella.

After fishing one of the pools I decided to walk up the bank and peer into the crystal blue pool to see what it held. 10-15 small to medium sized trout began to nervously swim around while what looked to be a fist sized log settled on the bottom didn't move. Then the log began to float up and with one whip of its tail a huge cloud of silt dirtied the pool. It darted up and down the pool a couple times before heading downstream to hide out. It wasn't a log of course, but a big high teens to low twenties sized brown trout, one of the biggest I've been lucky enough to see. Will be coming back and hopefully hooking up with this hog with a big streamer.

While in the excitement of catching a bunch of fish in this upper stretch of water I lost track of time and before I knew it my time to go was a couple minutes away. Ended up one-last-casting myself until it was past my time to go. Had to make good time back to campus to still get a little breakfast and make it to class.

In the evening I decided to rearrange some stuff in my car so I headed out to do so and ended up stoping and fishing for 15 mins. Didn't expect much but had one bite in this downstream marginal stretch of water.