A River To Fish

Today I caught another beautiful rainbow. 14 inches is conservative; it put up a nice little fight. The red arrow is the location on the Espolon under the wooden suspension bridge. Above the wooden bridge are rapids, not big ones, and there are no big boulders, but the water is moving, and there is lots of pocket water. Next time I will explore more just below the fast water and then go upstream to see if I can fish in the pocket water.

It’s on, I feel it take the hook, I let it run a little bit, then I went to grab the reel, and guess what, the reel came off. I’m in 3 feet of water, I have a beautiful rainbow on, and my reel is on the bottom of the river. I’m soaking wet from trying to grab it and hang on to the trout. Now I can’t see the reel, but I can follow the line. There it is.

I am totally drenched. When my socks get wet, I know water came over the waders. My wallet is wet again, my flies are wet, my shirt is wet, and my hat floats away. I grabbed it. I have the reel and I put it back on—what a mess.

I didn’t lose the trout.

I hope no one saw me, I can be such a kook.

Time to sit here on the riverbank and dry out in my underwear. I thought of bringing the phone into the water earlier just in case I caught one and could get a picture, but reasonableness prevailed, and I left it onshore.

So sorry, no picture today, but it was a beautiful fish and he put up a good fight. He was invisible, I could see the woolly bugger but not the fish, very strange. It could have been a Predator like in the movie.

I’ll sit here on the beach for an hour and read. By then, everything should dry out, and I can go back to fishing.

Today I lost the woolybugger I had and was catching fish on. It got caught on something deep, and no matter how I tugged, upstream or down, it was hooked for good.

The water level is still coming down, and the water temperature was 58 Fahrenheit. Cloudy to partly cloudy then bright sun.