Much Needed...

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