I took a much-needed day off from work Friday to fish with two friends, whom I haven’t seen all spring.  We did the two vehicle routine and fished from one vehicle to the other to cut down on walking time.

It was pretty chilly to start the morning, just like today (Saturday) without the heavy wind.  The stream we fished, as well as half dozen streams I checked on my drive in were all slightly off to clear despite all of Thursday’s rain.

We had the whole stream to ourselves and ran into no one of the roughly three mile fish we put in.  Standard nymphing was the way to go for most of the day with Princes (standard and purple), scuds, Hare’s Ears, and some caddis emergers responsible for most of the catching.  Some caddis came off later in the day – 3:00 with no real significant risers, but they were still willing to take a dry.

Yea, the sun finally came out and fishing was improved, but int he back of my head, I kept thinking about the three quarters of a million gallons of cow shit that washed into the upper headwaters of a particular trout stream in southeast Minnesota a little under a week ago. The MPCA has been curiously mum, so for now, the buck gets passed, no one gets blamed, and those of us who enjoy the resource get stuck with dead trout and cow shit smelling water from a manure lagoon that had PRIOR documentation that the walls were collapsing weeks before it actually gave way, and a government agency saying, “Don’t blame us.”

Which leads me to part two of the post, and, yes, I do want to talk about buffers, or lack of.  Expect to see more of this kind of thing on your local trout stream.  Mind you this is eased water in southeast Minnesota.  I’ll give you one guess as to what row crop is up top.

This picture was taken with me facing directly south on the stream.  I turned a hundred eighty degrees and faced north and snapped this picture.