Brookies and Busted Shins

My intentions today had been to work on the fire pit, and the beginning of the day began that way, but due to situations beyond my control, it was not to be. Having been itchin to go fishin, I saw it as an excuse to get out of the house for a bit. Little did I know that karma would repay me for fishin when I should've been workin around the yard. I got my things together, I loaded up the dog and headed out for a fringe stream in the Park.

I must interupt, right now it's been raining for over an hour. Started off real hard, but as now turned into a nice drizzle that shouldn't just run off. Wow, now if we could only get 3-4 more of these over the next 2 weeks. Anyway, Adicus and I got to the trail head and headed off until we hit water, and then started into the back country. Now I'll say that I've bushwhacked through some rough country before, but this was insane! Laurel hells (aptly named) thick as I have ever seen, steep hillsides (sometimes more cliff than anything), take a minute vines, loose rock, you name it, it was there. The only casualty was my zinger that holds my nippers, Damn!

After battling our way through some crazy terrain, we finally made it to the water. Unfortunately, the insane landscape did not end there. This was a very steep creek, even for me. And I love steep creeks. Adicus had a frustrating day, and frankly, so did I. The fishing was pretty good. Any decent sized hole held multiple specks, but getting from hole to hole could be quite the challenge. The stream bed was made up of a smoothed granite and quartz that my cleats couldn't bite into, this resulted in a lot of slipping and sliding. My shins are busted all to hell and I lost a ton of flies to the rhodo and laurel gods.

We got to see a waterfall that a lot of people probably never see, but then we had to climb through a laurel hell to get around it and that ended at a cliff. Yeah. After picking our way down, we finally got back to fishin. After retying my rig from loosing it in a tree, I was moving around a deep pool that I had just caught a nice brookie in, my feet lost traction and down I went. I mean like tit deep. The pool was v shaped and I kept grabbing at weeds to pull myself out, but they kept breaking off and sending me in deeper. Finally, I swam to the back of the pool, yes swam, and pulled myself out. Good thing my waders have like a million holes in them, they allowed all 50 gallons of water that had accumulated in them to drain. Alright!

Needless to say, by this point, I was ready to see the foot log that was my outpoint, but that was still a ways off. We continued to fish and continued to catch mountain gems, nothing big, but every hole was loaded with fish. After about another 20 minutes we finally reached the footbridge and began to make our way out. It was a long 3-4 hours of fishin. Frankly, it wasn't worth the amount of effort that went into getting there. I hate to say it, but it's true. It's not often that a stream eats me up, but this one did. I'm sure at some point I'll come back to it, I'm sure there are some big specks in there, but it will be a while before I venture back there.