This past week we headed to the Sacramento River for two
days of fishing. Wednesday I joined up with my dad and brother-n-law and headed
down on Thursday morning. Before hitting the river we stopped in at the local
fly shop in Redding to pick up some of their local knowledge. The weather
forecast had the showers stopping around 9:00am so we were hoping for a clear
day. With that forecast the big question for the day was waders or no waders? Thanks
to some smart thinking and just plain looking up at the sky we decided on
waders, otherwise it would have been a long day. From about 10 minutes in it showered,
rained, or dumped. Although the weather was not hot the fishing was for the
first day. The water was running just about perfect; right around 3400 cfs and
great color. After 7 hours on the water we landed around 30 and lost 25 more. The
majority of the fish were keyed in on the brown rubber legged bug and the
yellow bead head pupa. My brother-n-law was using that setup with no weight and
my dad was using the same setup with some weight, the setup without the weight
hooked into more fish. It was running at the right depth that the fish were at,
while my dad was probably below the majority of the fish.
 |
| What a group |
 |
| It is a good size fish, my hands are just big |
For me the most exciting part of the day was at 2:30pm, this
is when a nice mayfly hatch came off. In my opinion there is nothing better
than rolling out your line with a size 16 dry fly on the end. As soon as I realized
that it was going to stay I tied on my dry fly and I was at it. I had 5 good
sips at the fly with no takes, and then I got it. Just what you would want in a
dry fly take, fish came screaming out of the water and pummeled the fly. It was
fantastic, that one take is why I love to fly fish.
 |
| Bryce with one of his many |
 |
| The Young Guns |
 |
| Thank you Dry Fly |
 |
| The "Guide" and his monster |
Day two was a completely different beast. The weather was
sunny and the water was starting to mud up. Also today we had another guy join
up with us, so we split up and took two separate boats. There was the
experienced boat with my dad and his buddy who is a guide in southern Oregon
and then there was the young gun boat with Bryce and myself. They might have
had experience on their side but we had youth and enthusiasm on ours, so we
figured we should be able to out fish these guys. We did land the first fish of
the day but that is pretty much were our lead stopped. Fishing was completely different,
the spots that were productive the day before began to get muddy and the fish
weren’t biting. By lunch we had a total of 5 fish landed with 4 more lost and
the experienced boat had 7 landed with 6 more lost. We had ourselves a hole to
dig out of. After lunch the fishing just got worse, I shouldn’t say worse the
fish were more selective. We ended the day with 8 fish landed while the
experienced guys had a dozen to show for their efforts. I guess it does pay off
to have a guide in your boat. All in all it was a great trip, I think I can
speak for everybody that this kind of trip was needed, winter"idist" was setting
in and fishing had been slow. LTD
