Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Birthday Walk in the Woods
Today I turned 30 and since we just received 25” of snow, I thought it was a good of a time as ever to get back out in the woods. It’s been so long since I’ve been in the woods, I missed it. My wife and I went for a walk to a local river I fish quite often. Winter fishing can be brutally hard. If you are matching the hatch your best bet is to fish midges. I don’t fish midges at all. I refuse to tie on a fly that I can’t even see. I rarely subscribe to the match the hatch mentality. I prefer to give a proper presentation and find fish that are biting. The more you move through the woods the more you experience.
……………..Two roads diverge……………..
The snowshoers came and packed down a little trail all the way to the end of the river. This made the walking extremely easy. I brought my snowshoes but didn’t need them at all. After walking only a few hundred yards we came across a lot of wood shavings at the base of a tree.
At first I thought it was a woodpecker but the holes were perfectly made and the shavings were quite big. I’m not sure what made the hole.
Further down the trail we came across a large group of Mallard ducks. These must be some local ducks because they certainly didn’t fly south for the winter. They must also know it’s no longer duck season.
I finally made it to the section of the river I wanted to fish. It was a little over a mile from the parking lot. I saw one rainbow trout this whole section of the river. The river is about a foot deep and gin clear so it’s fairly easy to spot fish. I cast to him a few times before I got a little to close and hooked a half broken branch over the fish.
As I grabbed the branch I saw that I didn’t hook the branch, I hooked another fisherman’s streamer. I took it as a birthday souvenir. There was also an extremely small bead head nymph a little higher on the tree, I couldn’t reach that one though.
Ice forming at the end of some low hanging branches.
Here is a video of a duck feeding.