Jack gave me a call yesterday, he wanted to fish. My roommate and I were in route from Colorado to Minnesota to spend Christmas and the holidays with our families when he called. I jumped at the offer and told him I would clear the plan with my rents when I got home. My family didn’t have plans until later in the day so Jack and I were open to spend the morning and afternoon tromping along one of the open state park streams. I gave him a call back and we planned to leave at 5:30 am and head south.
We got to the river in the dark and watched the sun rise over the bluffs. It was a brisk Minnesota 14 degrees and I was loving it. Back in the Driftless and in my realm. I missed the warmth of standing in the flowing spring fed creeks and rivers in Minnesota while the rest of the winter world around us was frozen and still.
While making plans the night before we had decided to start the day on a larger body of water with a number of deep pools and cut-banks. Jack and I slapped on some streamers and went at it, switching between dead drift dredging holes and stripping through the seams. The first couple hours of fishing were slow and we didn’t have a whole lot of action. Although the water looked awesome, we only had a hit and a few follows and didn’t see many other trout. Around 10 am we hiked back to the car and headed to the next spot, a smaller feeder creek.
It didn’t take us long to find pods of fish schooled up in the numerous holes of the feeder creek. It is so cool to look down over a cut-bank into a pool and see 20-30 trout sitting in the bottom of it. Now the question was what would they eat and could we be stealthy enough to get to them? We sized down streamers and went into stalking mode. A couple failed stalks and failed hook sets later and Jack was on the board with a little brown and a few holes later I joined in on the fun.
We fished for a few more hours and brought a couple more fish to hand. Not a high numbers or size day but we had a blast enjoying the beautiful day and walking around in the woods in our Santa hats.
Photo Recap
Trout Travels 