This book once belonged to my grandpa<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

At the same time, this pattern is featured on one of the color plates in Ray Bergman’s “Trout”.\u00a0 It is on\u00a0Plate 16, titled “New Wet Flies”.<\/span><\/p>\n

I still like tying and fishing with the old patterns, and when I pulled up to a new stream reputed to be full of brook trout I decided “why not” and tied the fresh\u00a0yellow and red streamer on.\u00a0 It wasn’t long before before I was hooked up.\u00a0 Not\u00a0a brookie, but a respectable brown trout had completely inhaled the thing.\u00a0 \u00a0The next three were also browns, but then the brook trout took over.\u00a0 I’m not one\u00a0that gets all misty eyed over our native brook trout, but this was a fun change of pace.<\/span><\/p>\n

My Grandpa Phred, whom I often written about, often proclaimed how he preferred catching brook trout over browns.\u00a0 But we mostly fished the Kinni, where browns outnumber brookies by about 1000 to 1.\u00a0 We still caught\u00a0brookies\u00a0on occasion.\u00a0 “Why are there no big ones?” he would lament.\u00a0 I don’t think he realized, or at least accepted, that brook trout just don’t get that big.\u00a0 Especially when you keep every 9-incher you catch.\u00a0 In those days brook trout were “absent” from the Rush River.\u00a0 Until one day I caught one in between the bridges at Martell.\u00a0 It was about 8 inches long, I let it go.\u00a0 Once back at the car I reported to Phred that I had caught a brook trout.\u00a0 “The hell you did, there’s no brook trout in here!”\u00a0 “Well that’s what it was”.\u00a0 Not sure if he ever actually believed me.\u00a0 Brook trout are fairly common in the Rush now, as improved water quality has allowed them prosper.\u00a0 I once even\u00a0 caught a tiger trout in the Rush; this is pretty much the unicorn of the trout world, it is a hybrid between a male brook trout and a female brown trout.\u00a0 Phred caught one in the Kinni once, he cooked it for me for dinner.<\/span><\/p>\n

Back to the action on this new stream.\u00a0 I don’t remember ever talking to anyone about this place, even though it isn’t all that far away.\u00a0 Considerable stream improvement has been done here, making this narrow stream very fishable.\u00a0 On the section I fished, maybe a mile of it, the stream is about 90% “live”–almost all of it was capable of holding fish, and almost all of it fishable.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was working my way upstream, casting the Mickey straight up and stripping back faster than the current. In some spots this was tricky as the little creek moved along\u00a0 pretty good in places.\u00a0 At some point I decided to head back down to my starting point and explore downstream.\u00a0 Once I got to my starting point I tried casting downstream into the run.\u00a0 I hooked a good brown right away and realized how I had making this be harder than it had to be.\u00a0 All I needed to do was roll cast it down and across [not much to the “across” part, the stream was mostly about 10′ wide].\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

just lettin’ it hang down there…<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Strip it, let it hang, work it with the rod tip.\u00a0 It didn’t matter, they loved it, and I\u00a0was delighted when I realized I had lost\u00a0track of how many I had caught.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Many fish I caught while kneeling on the soft grass bank.\u00a0 On a couple I was actually sitting.\u00a0 The valley this creek flowed though is typical of the driftless area, steep hills running down to a narrow band of tillable land.\u00a0 There was a hint of green showing on the branch tips,\u00a0but the fields were still drab.\u00a0 I caught a couple, and missed several others that grabbed the fly while I left it hanging in the current as I did a scenery check.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fishing from the bank has an advantage I never realized before–when you’re standing in a stream, there is\u00a0almost always noise from the water flowing around you.\u00a0 Not necessarily a lot , but it is always there.\u00a0 Fishing from the bank\u00a0eliminates this ambient noise, and really lets you hear the birds, which are active everywhere now, but perhaps not as much as in this valley.\u00a0 The ever present blue jays and cardinals appeared to having their own version of the red vs. blue debate.\u00a0 Red winged blackbirds sang their song of spring, and many other unidentified songs mixed it up.\u00a0 I heard the bugling of cranes and the whistle of wood ducks.\u00a0Gobbling turkeys, cackling pheasants, even a grouse was drumming.\u00a0 Where else can you find all of these birds in one place? <\/span><\/p>\n

I was getting pretty hungry and stopped to check the time.\u00a0 I\u00a0remember thinking that if it was after 12, I would head back to the truck.\u00a0 It was 2:10.\u00a0 Time flies and all of that.\u00a0 I still had the Mickey Finn tied on, although it was looking a little ragged, the tinsel was coming unraveled after too many encounters with little pointy teeth.\u00a0 I know I would have caught even more fish had I scaled down the size of the fly, as I missed many, many hits.\u00a0 And I suspect I would have caught some bigger fish had I gone with a bigger, heavier fly.\u00a0 I’ve got no complaints, Mickey Finn served me well.\u00a0\u00a0Got back to the truck and decided to drive up the county road to scope out some other parking areas.\u00a0 I left my waders on in case I saw something good.\u00a0 Found a couple more access points, but the cold pieces of greasy pizza leftover from the night before that I was cramming down my face were tasting mighty good.\u00a0 That was enough trout for one day.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the “after” picture, Mickey is looking pretty ratty now<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you were going to head onto the trout stream with one fly, what would it be? Most would choose something safe, like a hare’s ear, pheasant tail, scud.\u00a0 A woolly bugger would be a\u00a0good bet.\u00a0 Dry fly snobs would likely pick an Adams.\u00a0 I got it in my head the other day that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1558,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1553"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1575,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions\/1575"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}