Hooks, Hornets, Nettle, and a Few Trout

I decided to get out and hit the water today since it was so nice out. It was supposed to get warm too, so a day wet wading a creek sounded good. I loaded Adicus since he had not been able to go on my last two trips and headed out to one of my favorite brown trout streams.

After arriving at my destination, I strung up the new 2wt and headed down the road until I reached where i wanted to get in. A harrowing descent through loose rock and thick brush I finally arrived at stream side ready to catch some fish. The water level looked good and I began to cast to likely spots. The first five good lookin holes yielded nothing, not even a bump. While casting to another hole, I finally hooked up, unfortunately it was my thumb. A size 14 yellow harey moose was embedded in my thumb. All right, this is starting out to be a stellar day! After a quick yank with the hemos, the fly was out and I was back on my way.

I started to randomly catch a few brownies in the 7-8" range, but nothing I would call consistent. I approached another nice hole and began to cast to only find that I was hung in a tree. I pulled the branch down, snagged my fly, and stepped off a rock to get back to where I could cast to another hole. As I'm false casting, I noticed Adicus starting to jump and yelp, I looked to my right and about 15 feet away in the tree I had just gotten my fly out of was a hornets nest the size of a basketball. And they were pissed and nailing the crap out of Adicus. I retreated rapidly while calling to Adicus, didn't need to, he was right behind me. I think he got hit 5 or 6 times before he got away and was quite irritated about the whole affair.

We rapidly proceeded upstream about 50 yards and got back to business. Things continued at about the same slow pace for the next hour, then it was like a light switch was flipped and I started catching fish out of almost every decent hole. I cast into the eddy next to a main run and hooked up with a double, a fish on both the dry and the dropper. Unfortunately, the larger of the two fish popped off as I was landing them, so I only got a photo of the 8 incher.
A lot of 8"-9" fish were caught today and my largest was a fat 10" brownie that sucked down my dry fly.

Adicus and I fished bit longer than we had intended to, mostly because things started out so slow and then got so much better later. I stumbled into multiple patches of stinging nettle, luckily there was plenty of jewel weed around to take the bun out. Between the hornets, hooking myself, and nettle, I was beginning to wonder which one of us was going to get bit by a snake! But the day ended with no more disasters, just a long walk back to the truck on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I played some fetch with Adicus while walking to the truck and just enjoyed being alive (and not been stung by hornets! Thanks Adicus!). While I'm typing this, Adicus is totally crashed out on his bed and I would like to believe very content about his day fishing with dad.