6-10-23 New York
After a long night of socializing around the campfire the night before, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to get out of bed at 5am to fish on my own before the guides arrived at 10. But I decided to suck it up, chug a water, and get my waders on. I hiked up about 150 yards from the cabin to a stretch of water that I’ve done well fishing out of my boat, but always wanted to spend some time and pic apart wade fishing. Unfortunately, as I was wading into position, I was quickly reaching the top of my waders and still had another 10 feet to go. I decided against going swimming at 5:45 in the morning and backed out. Instead, I fished some of the middle water and was able to pick off two small browns before heading downstream.
The river splits into three sections and I focused my time on the smaller sections that get a little less pressure. The water was pretty low in these sections, but they held some fish that were willing to eat nymphs.
I still had an hour to kill so I hopped back onto the main channel and fished the fast water. There were a lot of rainbows sitting in the fastest sections at the head of the riffles. The takes were almost immediate and you needed to be in contact quick to detect the strikes. I’m not sure why I don’t regard rainbows as highly as I do brown trout, but these rainbows put up a fight, they were angry and made some awesome runs.
The action slowed down on the rainbows so I headed to the tail out and was able to land a really nice brown trout. At that point, I decided to call it a morning and head back to the cabin and wait for the guides.
I went with the same guide and we did the same game plan as the prior day. He would take the new fly fisher down the runs and I would wade behind them about 50 yards and fish. The day was full of fired up rainbows and everyone was getting into fish. On two separate occasions I had a rainbow run all the way downstream to where the guide and the other angler were in the boat, luckily they saw what was going on and were able to steer clear of my line.
After having a lot of leader failures the day before, I decided to use heavier 5X tippet all day. The previous day’s failures were from my own casting issues and lack of skill in the wind. I almost always use 6X in low, clear conditions and never had anything happen even remotely like it did the previous day. That being said, the 5X worked fine but we really didn’t have any wind that day. I was hoping that it would have been a bit more forgiving in the wind.
After a full day of fishing, we were getting close to the boat launch and I was tight lining out of the boat as we drifted. The water looked phenomenal so I told the guide to get ready because someone was going to catch a fish soon. About 5 seconds later I hooked into something heavy that was fighting hard, I thought it was a shad for sure. It took off ripping downstream, then turned back upstream and headed back towards the boat. I reeled as fast as I could to keep tension on the fish and that’s when it went airborne, right in front of the boat, right in front of all 3 of us. A giant rainbow, biggest i’ve ever seen on this river. When it hit the water, the line snapped and the fish was gone…Rewind about 30 minutes before that happening, I noticed my tippet was a little frayed. I pulled on the fly a few times to see if the line was going to snap under tension and it didn’t, so I thought ok, this will be fine…After a full day of fishing, it’s really easy to get lazy and not get the little things right. Next time i’ll be more careful.
