Evening On The White River

After finishing up some work in the early afternoon today, I got a chance to spend some time trying my luck (yet again) on the upper sections of the White River with my father.  It was a really bright and hot day, so we spent some time just driving around, looking for a good spot to fish (the bright mid-day sun often puts down the fish).  After looking around for a while and checking out a few different spots, we finally settled on trying our luck on a stretch of very fishy-looking river near Rochester.  We spent some time on the water there and saw an impressive caddis hatch going on, but alas the fish just didn’t seem too interested in anything that we had to offer – dry or wet flies.

My father trying his luck in the riffles.

Again, my father trying to raise some fish.

Although by no means a great photo, this one serves to illustrate just how many bugs there were out there – all those small spots are caddis flies (and there were lots more out that are not visible in the photo).  It was a truly impressive hatch, but oddly enough the fish just didn’t seem interested.

After a little while of seeing absolutely no action down near Rochester, we headed up towards Brandon Gap to try the West Branch.  We didn’t have much time as we were trying to catch dinner at the Harpoon Brewery (in Windsor, VT), but even up here we didn’t see any fish activity.

I’m still very unsure of how to fish this water, and clearly what I’ve been trying isn’t working, but hopefully soon on one of these days I’ll figure it out.  For now, getting out fishing is still a good excuse to get outside, so… I’ll take that.

We did manage to make it to the Harpoon Brewery in time to catch dinner (often tricky, as their kitchen closes around and I even had one of the better beers that I’d ever had before – an oak barrel aged cask conditioned imperial IPA.  Wow, what a mouthful, but more importantly, what a beer!  (I even went back the next day for more – it was just that good!)