Perfect Day Fishing

Today was just about the perfect day for fishing.

Arrived at my closest brook trout stream around 11 AM, geared up, and saw two fish rising as I approached the first pocket.

Tied on a Hendrickson dry, #16, and caught a small fish on the 3rd cast.  However, two other fish "refused" my fly (i.e. rose but didn't take).  Spent the next 40 minutes or so trying to figure out why the refusals.  To make a long story short, after about 6 fly changes, and more than a dozen refusals, I concluded they just wanted something really small.  I tied on a #20 parachute adams, and became convinced it was what they wanted when a nice fish, that had refused a larger fly, rose again and this time swallowed the smaller one.  The #20 adams stayed on the rest of the day.

The fish below is fairly typical... I caught one or two larger, 5 or 6 of this size, and quite a few smaller over the next two hours.

Basically, it was a day when EVERY structure with enough depth provided a fish.  You wouldn't get a strike on every cast... but a good drift over anything deep enough, with slow current, would offer up a rise.  Usually on the first cast, though sometimes it would take two or three.  Once I got the fly size right, the only reason I would miss a fish would be if my presentation had too much drag.  Then I might raise a fish and get a refusal.  Once the fish came up it was hard to get him to come up again, though not impossible, and I probably saved half the chances I initially blew through better line control and persistent casts over the holding spot.

As you can see in the photo below, the water levels were perfect, and essentially all of these pockets were fishable.

There was so much activity, there seemed no need to count.  I'm guessing I caught about 20 fish in two hours or so.  You can see  below that my fly was well and truly gnawed.

Really, it was a spectacular day out.