Today my friend Tim decided to head this direction to chase trout out of his Dave Scadden inflatable fishing raft. We fished despite scattered storms in the forecast. We arrived on stream around 8am and drifted/fished until around 530pm. The stream had a good chalky greenish stain. We started out with streamers and moved a ton of fish. After trying a number of patterns I switched to a size 14 skittering caddis in light yellow which ended up gracing the end of my line for most of the day.
This was the first decent trout of the day. He took the skittered dry fly violently and put up a great battle in faster current. In the background you can see the "turret" seat complete with a custom stripping basket and balance bar that Tim rigged up since the last time I've been on his boat.
This nice trout took the skittered caddis in a back eddy and put up a great fight on the 9' four weight. At this point it hadn't begun to rain. We switched off paddling, fishing, and wading. I continued with the caddis and Tim focused on streamers. At one point I landed spunky 15 inch brown on Tim's rig.
Tim is a beast on the sticks and was patient with me while I flailed away and did wrong shit. We did landed a fair amount of fish both from the boat and while wading. By mid afternoon we noticed a few big, pale mayflies, bwo's, and caddis here and there but no consistent hatch.
Fish slashed at the streamer often but even after many fly changes we could not hammer down a consistent producer. Fish ate the caddis throughout the afternoon but not as well as I've experienced over the last few years. The average size fish was much larger, however.
Near the end of the float the skies opened up. We grabbed the rain gear we figured would get put to use and continued to fish. Unfortunately we didn't catch much after this point. I landed around 1 1/2 dozen fish throughout the day. Most fish were between 10-12 inches but quite a few in the 13-14 inch range came to hand as well as a few larger. Can't wait to do it again!
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