West Fork

I fished from the motorcycle for the first time today. It took about 20 minutes to figure out how to get everything attached to the bike, but after that, off I went. Because of riding the bike today, my trusty sidekick Adicus would not be joining me this afternoon. I enjoyed a pleasant ride up above Canton for my destination for the day. After getting to my pull off, it took a bit longer than usual to get everything together and lock the bike up. After all that was done, down the road I went.After walking about a half mile, I found a fairly convenient place to drop to the water, I tied on a EHC and a PT dropper and got down to business. Fishing started out slow and pretty much continued that way all afternoon. I only made contact with 4-5 fish all day, not good. The good news was that the two fish I actually landed were rather chuncky, unfortunately, I lost another whale of a fish today. My first fish was caught out of the middle of a fast deep run. The brownie was sitting in the feeding lane right where he was supposed to be and slurped my caddis off of the surface as it passed over him. He put up a valiant fight, but was laid out for a photo in the end.

I continued to move upstream, slipping around large boulders and climbing up frothy cascades, casting to any likely spots with no luck. I climbed over a large rock and saw a beautiful run hidden in deep shade with moss covering the bottom of the chute. I made a gentle cast to the tongue of the pool, as it swept past a rock and around a bend, a very large brownie sipped the caddis of the surface as pretty as can be. I tentatively set the hook and all hell broke loose. The surface turned into a explosion of whitewater and the tethered beast shot straight up in the air, throwing my caddis back at me as a sign of his victory. It was over that quick. Two seconds, maybe. Man that was a big fish. I reckon he might have gone for 17-18" and was fat.

I moved on, a bit saddened at missing yet another large fish, I came to a run that was almost a duplicate of the one I had just lost Mr. Big to. Excited. I got into a position to make a good cast and did just that. A nice brownie slashed at the caddis in a violent way and the fight was on. This guy had a lot of fight in him. He kept tearing through the pool, trying to get under a rock to break me off or to pop loose. To my satisfaction, neither of these options came to be and I was taking photos of this beast within a minute.

After chllin for a few a bit after releasing another beautiful brown trout, I moved on upstream, acutely aware of not having my fishin buddy with me today. I probably fish with Adicus 75-80% of the time I spend on the water. I hadn't noticed until today how used to havin him with me I've gotten, and this was a stream I normally would have had him with me on. Unfortunately, I'm just not driving the truck much due to gas prices. The fishing pretty much died completely at this point. I don't think I even saw another fish for the next hour. Despite this, I continued to enjoy being out on the water.

It was a beautiful day to be on the water even if the fish didn't want to cooperate. I had a very nice ride home. I was nice and warm out, the sun was shining, and it was nice to just to be out and not doing yard work that should have been getting done.