Wild Brookies And Wild Browns

There are streams in this valley

As I have said many times before March is my worse month for catching fish. And that fact remains but for a few outings last week. We finally got a break in the weather and temps got to 60. The snow melted which brought up the streams and got the trout moving and feeding. The now melt caused the streams to run somewhat off color which I think were to my advantage.

Hidden among hemlock and pine this little blue line had some hungry brook trout.

This guy wasted no time jumping at my offering.

It's these tributaries that hold some beautiful trout. The trout run up and back down at will. It is at these junctions where one might encounter brook trout.

Brook trout plus..........equal wild Tiger trout.

I took several strikes along this riffle.

Including this lovely brown.

This guy was the catch of the day. A strong one that has been in this stream for some time. With browns like this along with the increase of wild brookies in a stream dominated by wild browns leads me to believe this stream may have a few Tigers start to show up.

"True Colors"

Those of us who tie flies, especially those who tie soft-hackles and spiders know that a famous maker of fly tying silk which is used in the construction of so many of the soft-hackles and spiders. The Pearsall Gossemer silk is no longer on the market. The availability of some odd colors and from sources such as estate sales and ebay are pretty much the only places to get Pearsall's. A couple of years ago I was made aware of another company offering a silk thread. The company name is YLI. Since I first learned of YLI's offering's I have purchased several colors and have tied many flies using it. It offers the same quality as Pearsall's, and it holds what I consider to be most important factor in silk thread it's true color when wet. Above is a spool of YLI olive thread. Olive is one of my staples and many of my flies use olive silk as a body.

Here is a spool of Pearsall's silk thread. It is a chestnut brown and one of my favorite colors for soft-hackles and spiders.

I have several flies tied with both YLI and Pearsall's. Using thread bodies and both grouse and woodcock feathers for hackle. The first is a Woodcock and Olive.

This one is a Grouse and Olive

This one is a Woodcock and Chestnut

And this one is a Grouse and Chestnut. Now you can see the colors of both silks as they are dry. The test taken was to show what they look like when wet. You will see that they hold their color. Some threads will darken when wet and that's OK in some cases. But I prefer they stay true.

Woodcock and Chestnut, wet.

Grouse and Olive wet.

Does all this color make a difference to the fish, I would say it does.

March Angling

March is about the toughest month for small stream angling, at least for me. I can fish a section of stream that has produced for me in the past and I won't even get a bump. It does not matter what I'll fish for it seems most everything will be rejected. I guess the transition is felt more by the trout I seek than the way I feel at the time I'm on the stream. I fished a few days where it was gorgeous, warm and sunny with perfect stream flows. I saw a few bugs about but not a taker.

I move about enjoying all that I'm offered by the beautiful surroundings. Have you noticed a different sound to the birds, encouraging indeed. This stretch of stream has yielded some beauties for me like.....

....this handsome wild brown.

Trout above and trout below. This antiquated dam from years past keeps the stream divided. These useless relics must go.

The section above the dam was very nice. I gazed into one pool and saw several small brook trout just sitting almost motionless. I cast fly and let it drift. In a moment I saw the line hesitate.

Here is one brookie that was hungry. So for a March day I'm satisfied.

"One Man's River"

As children we have those moments when we say to ourselves " I've seen that before" or "I have been there" when in fact we were never "there" or we "never saw that".....As we get older we experience these same feelings and they seem to be more realistic and vivid. Just the other day I to had one of these moments when I saw someone I knew, only to find that was not the person I knew but in fact the person I was talking to had been to the same place where I remember him from. Please don't think I've flipped, but this does happen and it brings me to the reason for this post.

Several weeks ago I received this book from a reader of Small Stream Reflections. I placed the book on my desk and had planned to start reading it in the following days. I continued what I was doing before placing the book down and soon I found myself picking up the book and thumbing through it....I never put the book down. I read it from cover to cover. It was like I was the man who wrote it. I never in my life heard of the author, O. Warren Smith..until that day. The book never crossed my many paths in search of fly fishing reading material. When I think of the places, sites, and real old book stores I've visited I never saw anything written by this man. The way O Warren Smith wrote is very similar to what I write. They were musings, jotting down parts of life's happenings along a small stream. Some of what he wrote were so much like my writings. His love of the little stream he fished is so well expressed. Now this book was published in 1942, five years before I was born....