Shenandoah, May 2009

I went with my friend Dan to the Shenandoah this weekend. The water was high, they'd gotten a LOT of rain, but the streams were fishable (in some cases barely). On Friday, we fished the main stem of the Rose.

In retrospect, we probably should have fished the headwaters not the main stem. The docent at the campgrounds said that Hogcamp Branch (the main trib of the Rose) was fishing great. On the Rose itself, which is downstream of the junction with Hogcamp, very few of the plunge pools were fishing at all (just a mass of white water). We found ourselves fishing little back eddy's off to the side, and quieter pools and runs that in regular conditions are probably too low to hold nice fish. So we caught a few fish, but they generally ran small. While I was spending a fair amount of time with Dan helping him learn (this was his first time fishing with a fly rod), my fish count was barely double digits over the course of the whole day. Good news is that Dan managed to catch some fish on both days.

Couldn't get any fish to rise except where they were rising to naturals. There was one nice pool where they were hitting caddis: I tied on a match, raised about 8 fish, and despite a number of refusals managed to land two or three nice ones. But for me, despite keeping the caddis on for the next couple of hours, I had no further surface action. Everything else I caught, before and after, was on a BHPT. Dan did catch one fish on a nymph (missed a bunch, early on), and one on a caddis.

Saturday we walked down to the Hoover Camp on the Rapidan along the Mill Prong trail. It's 2 miles and 700 vertical feet below Skyline drive. The Marine Corps built this as a retreat for the President, who loved to fish. It's located where the "Mill Prong" and the "Laurel Prong" join to form the main stem of the Rapidan. We ran into another fisherman at the camp, and learning from the previous day, decided to fish up from the camp along the Mill Prong (secondary advantage of taking us closer to home). The fish were quite active...I landed six in the first 10 minutes, happily rising to my "Mr. Rapidan" parachute fly. Unfortunately the fish were also pretty small. Largest was 9".

While I was catching fish on my own, Dan was raising a bunch and missing them all. So when I caught up with him after about 20 minutes, he was pretty frustrated. Spent some time sorting out his casting, and helped him catch a few. For a first timer he was actually doing great.

Then we walked back up to the car (a hard 90 minutes, up hill all the way), and drove home via Washington, DC. With stops for lunch and gas it took us about 6 hours, including some awful traffic on I-66 approaching DC. It's an exhausting drive, even when moving, because there's heavy traffic everywhere on I-495 and I-95. I do prefer the western route, even if it's an hour longer on paper.