You Can't Make This Stuff Up

My little baby, the Tiny Ten was given some rough treatment on a recent outing. The rod was dropped into the stream in the process of landing a brook trout. Here's the story. While fishing this stream I was blessed with several nice brookies. The fish were taking the orange soft hackle, which is actually a dry fly. It is a tenkara fly that I can never remember it's name. As it turned out it was the only fly I used.

Well in the process of bringing a brookie to hand I managed to drop the rod in the water not so bad right. Well the rod got filled with tiny sand grains, which I found out later was a "big" problem. But it did not stop my fishing because I didn't know about it until I got back to the car and tried to collapse the rod. It did not move, the sections were sounding gritty. More on that later.
 

 

In almost every little pocket there was a brookie. You had one shot to hook them and quite a few I missed.
 

 This one came from that pocket in the last photo, I think you can see it.

Pretty simple...hook, thread, and 3-4 turns of hackle.

 

Here I was upstream in the fast water. I worked my way down to where I could drift the fly at the head of the pool. As I lifted the fly towards the surface the fish hit. He made a run upstream towards me. As he got close he somehow managed to get between my legs. I had two choices, one was to fall on my ass into the stream, the other was to attempt to grab the fish. I chose the second option. As I tried to hold the fish by the hook in his lip that's when the rod fell in the water. After some fancy leg work I managed to grab the rod and low and behold the brookie was still on.
 

Here he is. Pretty fish. Well when I got home the TT got taken apart section by section. Each was rinsed in cold water and allow to dry. I'm happy to say it's perfect.