New Water | 1/22/2019 – Trout Travels

Last summer on our way back from fishmasters (a weekend where all of the guides from Sasquatch Fly Fishing head south to camp out and fish) the two guys I was riding with and I decided to make a pit stop on a new river that none of us had fished before. We found a beautiful stretch of water and a number of fish willing to take a stonefly nymph or small rs2. We also saw a number of big fish. I knew we had to go back after at some point… today was the day.

I did a bunch of online searching earlier in the week and found that this river has a fair amount of public water. I picked out a few longer stretches that I could cover some ground with streamers. Around 10 AM Tuesday morning I had my waders, coat, and gloves on ready to battle the mid-teens temps and I made my way down a steep embankment to the river. This freestone was showing the effects of cold days prior to my arrival and there was a considerable amount of ice shelves reaching out across the river as well as slush floating through the rapids. I tied on a fix and went to work trying to pick apart the holes and deeper runs where I figured fish would be sitting on a cold winter morning.

After covering a few promising looking spots I noticed a fish following close behind my streamer. I accelerated the pace of the fly then paused it for a second before twitching it forward with the tip of my rod. Like clockwork the colored up brown aggressively took a strike at the fly and he connected with the hook. After a hard fight he rested in my net and I could get a good look at the largest fish I have landed so far in 2019.

I was pretty pumped to be on the board. I continued to make my way upstream and as the day warmed up I began to have more follows and hooked into a few more decent fish.

After fishing the first section to where the public water turned private I drove downstream and hit a few more spots. I found a lot more completely frozen over water than I would have liked to have seen but I did find a few fishable spots and caught a few more fish before the day ended. The mid-morning streamer bite around 10-11 am was definitely the best fishing of the day though.