Number one son hasn’t been fishing yet this season due to our crazy weather and abnormally high flows but since we’re headed out on an extended road trip soon, he went with me to a small stream this weekend to get in some practice. Let’s just say that he was ‘strongly encouraged’ him to come fishing. I usually just let him do his own thing and if he’d rather blow up shit and kill people on the X-Box, well I guess that’s OK. He gets plenty of exercise between training for wrestling and tennis so if he doesn’t want to hump all over creation chasing little trout, that’s cool.
However… We do have a big fishing/camping road trip starting next week so this time I compelled him to get out and get himself sorted before we leave. Of course, it pissed rain all day and didn’t clear until late in the evening. And… it ended up being an 12-hour fishing and hiking ironman sort of affair going 9AM to 9PM car-to-car. I probably cured him of any desire to go fishing ever again. I’m sure 20 year from now he’ll have plenty of stories about the insane shite his crazy Dad pulled in the name of ‘fun’…
Despite the rain, the river was in fine shape, low enough for easy wading but still cool from the persistent snowmelt runoff. The fishing was steady throughout the day. We both caught plenty of small cutthroats and I tagged a few bigger fish. Late in the evening, a lot of mayflies started popping off and the fishing got hot. One beautiful eddy in particular had been an unsolvable puzzle for me in previous trips. I knew that it looked just too fishy not to hold a bunch of nice cutthroats. As I suspected, when the hatch came on, there were trout slashing all over the place along the eddy-line. Very unusual for Coastal Cutthroat, they were selective feeders due to the hatch. They completely ignored a the caddis imitation we’d been using and amazingly dissed a swung softhackle too! After a good bit of frustration, I solved the puzzle with a small Quigley Cripple and a downstream slack line presentation.
Maybe the funniest thing was when he decided to pick up this cool green rock and it croaked and hopped away from him.
Next up, a week or so wandering Idaho with no set plan other than catching Westslope Cutthroats and not getting trampled by moose…
About CrowMountain