Welcome back, Mojo.

The fishgods must be smiling down...every once in a while opportunities present themselves which give us occasion to fish. You can plan a trip to the Bahamas and go with expectations in check (or blown wildly off base), same thing for Alaska, the West, Belize... This weekend I accepted an invitation to join a dear friend of mine (I'll call him "Stickman") at his cabin for an hour or two of fishing on Friday night and a half day on Saturday. (I had to get home so my wife could leave me in charge of the kids while she celebrated the eventual birth of my next niece/nephew at my sister-in-law's baby shower). On a side note, I called my bro and asked him what he was going to do since his wife had left town for the "shower". He said he hadn't decided. He has a full time job, a new house and a wife carrying his first born. Luckily he called me on my way out to Stickman's cabin and said he was on his way to the N. Umpqua (Attaboy, Bro.) As usual I digress. Back to the weekend. Friday after maximizing my sales opportunities at work, picking the kids up from daycare and cleaning up a last minute incident concerning my 2 year old who hasn't quite grasped the "potty training" process....#2, if you're interested, I grabbed a 3 weight 6'9" AJ Thramer and a 7'6" 4-5 weight Don Schroeder and 2 reels. I added 1/2 doz bagels, 3 granola bars, my tooth brush, rainjacket, waders and boots, my trout flies, tippet material, nippers, 1/3 of a bottle of Gray Goose, 2 local microbrews left in the fridge and an open bag of tortilla chips. Runnin' lean. I listened to Dec Hogan talk about swinging flies to steelhead on a podcast on the 2 hour run north. I didn't give a thought to where we were going to fish, how many we might catch or what hatches might be on. I was really just happy to get out of the house and see Stickman.
I pulled into the cabin at 7:30, laced up my boots, strung up the Thramer, and tied a tippet while Stickman drove the 20 minutes to the evening fish. (Are you doing the math? 7:30 + 20 minutes = 7:50 pm.) We stopped fishing at 9:15. I caught somewhere in the range of 25 trout.
Phenomenal. Nothing huge...but constant steady action. Mostly Brook trout. Wow.
We drove back the cabin, drained the goose, ate some chips and defined ours and the worlds problems. 1 am to bed, 6:30 awake. A dizzy piss of the porch, a cup of coffee for the road and a granola bar to take the edge off.
Stickman drove to another creek, put me in position and let me go. I took a few brook trout in the first hole and was unhooking my 16 or 17th in the second hole when Stickman joined me from the stretch he was fishing. We fished side by side for 15 minutes, both catching and releasing a number of trout. An errant cast or a puff of wind sent Stickmans flies in a tree upstream and he set his rod down to watch me fish until we could fish past the snag. I had a very nice brown shark my elk-hair caddis and miss (because I freaked and took it away from him). A 15 or 16" brown trout stalking your fly from an undercut, in a gin clear spring creak at the end of a 20' cast (at most) is a bit unnerving for a guy who's luck has sucked as much as mine has in the past number of weeks. But it was cool because Stickman was there watching it with me. A few casts later, I hooked and landed a 17" brown, in full daylight on a run where we had already hooked and released 20 or 50 trout. It was a big fish. Thick and deep and strong. (A brown trout in this part of the world get's it's "shoulders" at 15 or 16".) It was also cool because I was fishing the 3 wt. Thramer which is a little rod (but really sweet). It was cool because this run was 20' wide X 40 yards long. It was cool to have a good friend standing there waiting for me to fish up to his snag...watching me fish, keeping me company. It was great to have him net it and shake my hand and say "That's a nice fish man!" when we both know that all I did was show up. It was his water, his cabin, his scouting and his fly selection that gave nuts to the bull.
I had no plan, no real design for how the few hours of fishing were going to turn out. But, had I left the house with unreal expectations on Friday night, I would have exceeded them.



Nope, this isn't the spot...nice though.


I hate reading about poetic anglers thrilled about catching an 8" Brooktrout.
(Though I like to do it myself)


Fontinalis


Decent Brown amidst the Brooks.


Standard Issue BT


Stickman's BT Magnum


More Trout...Hell I caught a pile of them. I needed to take a few pics.


17" Brown, 3 wt Thramer, wood begets wood.