Find yourself some friends who will cook for you and refuse your help, and you’ll feel 90% full and 10% guilty. Then you’ll shamelessly forget about the 10% the next day when you’re 100% all-in on fishing.
This is what happens when you’re on a fishing trip with Jake and Matt. Armed with Yetis that were armed with food, they arrived at camp eager to cook and, well, feed me. Brats, hash browns, and eggs. My good-for-nothing cooking skills left me with just enough confidence to stir the potatoes and that’s it. I contributed jack squat.
Jake and Matt cooked, I ate. At times I offered to help, which they declined. What they did accept was the only thing of value I had – a sad and soggy grocery bag of clementines. Silently, I acknowledged just how satisfied my stomach had become as a result of this community’s unequal distribution of labor, and then selfishly thought, “Keep these friends for life.”
As for the fishing, it was tough! Which came as a surprise. Refreshingly and unseasonably (and ominously), air temperatures ran up through the 80s. The water surpassed 60 degrees, which to me meant the arrival of summertime fishing and the hope of breaking out the dry flies.
I could not have been more wrong.
Their vermiculations, which were delicate and ornate enough to evoke an audible gasp from us both, are now lost to history.
No rises all day. The first three hours of casting nymphs at structure produced one fish, a very nice brown trout that we celebrated as Matt’s first of the year.
At the next access, dragging nymphs through troughs succeeded where casting at structure had failed. Matt caught another brown, which behaved. I hooked two brook trout, which didn’t, because they shoehorned themselves right through the honeycomb holes of my net and escaped before I could take photos. Their vermiculations, which were delicate and ornate enough to evoke an audible gasp from us both, are now lost to history.
The rest of the day yielded nothing. Word from Jake was that he hooked into five browns from his drift boat. Dark-colored soft hackle in one hole launched all the fireworks.
The fact that I and Matt could still pull out some fish in highly pressured waters while Jake caught five in a boat actually made me feel pretty good. That’s because we were about average compared to others who, apparently, experienced the same ho-hum day.
It seemed the fish were still hanging in their winter holes (sorta…just shallow ones) and not in the seams or typical woody structure. Didn’t think that would happen, but you learn. It’s April fishing. For the early season, not so bad at all.
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