Friday, May 10

by daveanderson on 11 May, 2013, no comments

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.

mark3

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.

pump

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.

mark2

mark1

More of the Ugly

by daveanderson on 21 April, 2013, no comments

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.

4_20_field1This picture was taken with me facing directly south on the stream.  I turned a hundred eighty degrees and faced north and snapped this picture.

4_20_field2

 

Strip, strip, and strip some more

by daveanderson on 8 April, 2013, no comments

After talking to a few reliable sources of information, one of whom spent three days fishing during this week’s runoff, I ventured out and found some very fishable water.  The first stop was slightly stained, not dirty at all.  Air temperatures were around 38 degrees this morning with water temperatures more than that, but it was still plenty cold.

I started with a basic tandem nymph rig and caught a few, but the pace of catching was too slow for my liking, so I changed things up to a small gray marabou leech on 5x Fluorocarbon.

4_7_13_1

I stayed with the leech for the remainder of my first stop and was not disappointed at the size and quality of the fish.

4_7_13_2

4_7_13_3

4_7_13_4