Christopher K

People never seem to realize it but IMO this is the best time of year for steelhead, no one targets them and they're quite aggressive. Nice one there Kit!

At Sail we have the Crucial/Citica combo for I believe $200 right now, great combo.

Just a heads up, a life jacket is absolutely REQUIRED for canoes, and even if it wasn't law you'd be an idiot to be paddling without one.

Yes, leeches are legal as far as I know.

Thanks a lot IR4J!! Extremely helpful!

 

One thing I forgot to mention in the initial post, though. I currently have 6 lb line on my rod. Is this enough?

 

Thanks,

Grappler29

6lb is plenty, the lakes although stained are clear, 6 lb is plenty strong for bass and trout.

I'd say it does look to be around the 30" mark, definitely a nice healthy fish. If you don't want to do the gill hold yet, grab the fish across the back behind the gill plates, the gill plate hold isn't that hard though, you just have to be careful not to reach into it's mouth.

Nice report but not alot of fish.

Hmmm, don't recall seeing a lot of reports (or fish) from you....

 

Great looking water there, nice report man!

Oh no. I've done 16 hours straight lol. Especially fishing in the summer for Browns at my local creek. going out at dusk till first light. Awesome time.

Ya I think my longest is 17 hours, and I wasn't the one who threw in the towel LOL!

I don't think there's anything I enjoy more than fly fishing trout streams less than 30 feet across with ultra light fly gear. I only have 1 "secret" creek and it isn't even all that secret, but that's fine by me as I find the popular trout streams often have amazing fishing and when you take into consideration how many people fish them they really aren't even all that pressured compared to say any steelhead river in the world!

For a couple months I have been staring at a beautiful little 2wt butterstick in the corner of my room waiting for a chance to try it out, I had thought that this opportunity would have been on trout opener but looking at the rains we had and the still cold water temperature it had to wait. But in the last week the water has finally climbed above that 50* mark and I knew then it was time to fish.

One nice thing about this time of year is the water is cold enough that the fishing only really heats up around noon, so after sleeping in on Saturday the car was packed. Waders, vest, fly box, rods, reels, leaders, let's go fishing!

I would talk about how the water looked, how many people were there, what bugs were hatching, but I think it would become too obvious what river this is if I did, so here are some pics.




This last fish I've been waiting for for a long time. My previous PB for a brook trout was only 10.5", over 3 years of brook trout fishing and I had yet to hit the magic 12" mark. So here's what happened. The pool I fish is a deep riffle that leads into a deep slow pool, usually I ignore the head of this pool because it's not very conducive to dry fly fishing, but I decided what the heck since the fish were hitting so well and decided to put my fly under the low handing pine branches to see it anything lived there, turns out something was! I could just see a head rise to take the fly, I set the hook, it bent the rod in half and started doing the classic big fish bulldog, and just as quickly as it began it ended as with one head shake the hook was spit. I felt pretty awful about that but knew that fish was still there, he wasn't moving and he had to keep eating. So I fished for 10 minutes downstream of the fish and then punched another cast into the head of the pool. First cast and he took it, this time I wasn't making the same mistakes, rod tip to the side, take my time, slide the fish into the net and its picture time.




Tight lines,
Chris

November was an exciting month, when you're forced off the rivers because your waders are freezing solid and you can't take it anymore you know it's going to be a good winter, and it started off that way. However, by the end of December it was starting to get old, freezing rain, horrible driving conditions and already having to drill through a foot of ice, it wasn't shaping up to be as great a winter as we'd hoped. 

 

Now we're still ice fishing and running vehicles on the ice in late March, I was just about ready to buy a one way plane ticket to Mexico, but then it finally happened, temperatures climbed above zero and the ice is now on it's way out. Open water means only one thing in March, STEELHEAD! So this morning at 6am I loaded the car and headed east. 

 

I fished a few pools down, in the process foul hooking one fish before it got off and seeing several others, this was getting me very excited for the day. At the next pool I spotted a small ice flow along the shore and found this fish resting under it, she actually let me touch her tail and didn't move, which was strange because it didn't appear to be spawned out and looked fairly silver.

 

 

This pool was perfect in every way, it had 2 currents meeting, it was long, deep and had a good number of large boulders in it, but I could not see or hook one fish in it, so I packed up and started following the trail downstream. Before I had passed the tailout of the pool I noticed that just before the pool turned to a small rapids it got very deep and had a large boulder right at the end which was just begging a fish to rest in front of it. I figured it was worth a shot and proceeded to make about 10 drifts to this area before hooking this brute, my first open water fish of 2014.

 

 

Downstream a ways I did get a savage hit from another fish but missed the hookset, next time! Here are a few random photos.

 

This guy was a VERY welcome sight.

 

And a couple rod shots.

 

 

I hope to add to this report this weekend or next week 

Take a look at the dyna kings as well.

Thank you for the tip!   My fly rod came with the the same kind of hard pink case.....very cute and right up my alley!

 

I'm actually looking for something that will hold a 7-8 ft 2 pc rod......pink is a bonus! or maybe necessary....still not sure.... 

Good metal tube and a can of spray paint will do the job!

Ck is right, but some people do complain about bright rods spooking fish, might just be excuses though lol!

carp bite lightly a lot of the time, a larger float will experience more water resistance when a fish is pulling it down, slim floats will "shoot" down into the water even with a light bite.

You guys know you aren't allowed to fish mountsberg for ANYTHING out of bass season right?