East Truckee River - Sunday January 25th

Continuing on with our East Truckee River push we headed back out on Sunday afternoon for what would be a comedy of errors.  I arrived solo at the river banks around 11:30.  Windless, midges on the surface, water clarity about perfect.  Reached in to my fly pack and shit, I left my god damn nymph box at home.  Oh well, I bring three rods when I go out and my streamer rig is still tied up from last week.  Should I retie?  Nah, just feed the addiction and get your line in the water.   SHIT, where did my fly go??  Musta cast the damn thing off, should have retied.  Oh ya, I put all of my streamers in the Pyramid fly box I'm building so I only have a few garbage streamers left in my river streamer box.  Well, lets just reboot this day and go get our nymph box.  Drove back to the house and grabbed my box and my buddy Garret who's just getting in to fly fishing.  Back on the water at 1:30, where f*ck did this gale force wind come from?  Wind knot, retie, wind knot, retie, move to another section up stream, wind knot, retie, pull out hair.  Deep breath, settle down, god damn, its already 4:30?  I really wasted this day.

I left a lot out but the point looks pretty well illustrated.  It was just one of those days.  After I pulled my head out of my ass I walked upstream a bit to a little tailout that was a good spot prior to the river repair project and found that it had been improved.  One cast right into the riffle sent the indicator into the vanishing act, hook set, fish on.  I didn't land ol' boy but it was enough to get my fix.  I'd estimate him (looked like a male) at about 14" and he was nice and healthy.  He did a series of breach water acrobatics with mouth wide-open, it was a kick.  I was fishing a golden stone as my top anchor fly trailing a custom flashy BWO emerger pattern I tied up about a year ago. I could see my stone fly so suffice to say he'd taken the BWO.  I'll get the fly posted to our flies page tonight with a materials list and instructions.

At the end of the day, that one hook up was the only action we had aside from one indicator bounce that seemed way to ferocious to be a snag but it didn't result in a hook up.  keeping slack limited on the mend was a tough act with that wind yesterday.
As an honorable mention, the flows on the river @ the Reno Marker appear have been bumped up from around 200CFS to 220-230 on Friday (Jan 23rd) around mid-day.  As mentioned above, no residual impact to water clarity but fluctuating flows do have an effect on the bite, good and bad depending on the case you're dealing with.  Here is a link to another blog that cover's the topic in a bit more detail.  - http://normcrisp.blogspot.com/2012_09_01_archive.html

Key take aways from the outing:

• Don't be a fool, check your tools - before you leave.  I've been fly fishing for 22 years and forget something every single time.  This time it wasn't the sun flower seeds.
• We were too busy playing dumb-ass to make good use of our time.  The limited success we had came at 5pm, in faster water than we've been fishing for the last couple of weeks.  It wasn't a drastic change in water speed and our sample size was too small to give any real certainty to the idea that fish might be moving up from the frog water in to the riffle but hey, keep it in mind as a possibility.  The water was still cold as a witches tit, that's for sure.
• BWO patterns are still working and the flies them selves are certainly still hatching around 1-2PM, present on the water surface til dusk.   That's two weeks in a row with fish caught after 4pm.
• Regardless of the pace of the water you're fishing get the flies low, the fish still appear to be focused on the lower portion of the water column.

-Bobby