43° And Raining

I woke up today at 6:30 in the morning.  All of a sudden, it was 8:30.  And it was pouring outside.  A quick check of the radar proved of no help as well.  It went without saying that my plan to meet up with Dalton to go fishing had been called off.  Bummer.

Still kind of groggy, I decided to lay back down for a bit.  Well, as things go, a bit turned into a long while (I’m embarrassed to actually say when i woke up…), but when I woke up the weather was looking better.  That is to say, it was no longer pouring… Ugh.  And the radar looked a little more promising, with my destination at least momentarily being out of the rain.  After a quick call to the Midd Mountaineer, I decided it was worth taking a drive up and over the mountains to go fishing for at least a few hours, even it was going to be miserable all day and I didn’t really expect any action.

When I got to the river, conditions were uninspiring to say the least – it was 43° and varying between strong mist to light rain.  Not so fun, but I’d driven over so I had to give it a shot.

A lot of the water looks like this, although I imagine it’s flowing high right now from all the rain (this is my first time fishing on this stream, so I’m not sure).

I spent an hour out there throwing various streamers without any luck before I began to get rather chilled.  I did get one good tug towards the end of the hour on a small white marabou muddler, but nothing else.  As the rain was also intensifying, I decided to take a break and drive up to visit the guys in the Mountaineer.  I picked up a bunch of awesome and enormous flies from those guys and also got some great info before heading back down to the river.

I tied on one of the biggest flies I had just gotten, a #2 sleazeburger, and started chuckin’ it around, working the same bit of water that had previously given me a hit.  Strip, strip, pause… strip, strip, pause… recast.  And repeat.  As I worked deeper into the hole, I paused for an extra second.  All of a sudden, the line went taught.  Yehaw, fish on!  By the feel of it, it was a good sized fish, but I didn’t realize just how nice until I brought it up to the surface.

After a few minutes of play, I finally netted the fish!  He turned out to be my third biggest fish of the year, and definitely my biggest VT fish!  I was plenty stoked.

That’s a mighty fine lookin’ fish.

Fall browns are awesome!

And letting go.

Wow.

I fished for a few more minutes before it became too dark to see anything, but I only managed to lose a few flies and didn’t see any more action.  That’s alright though, as the fish I caught was not only beautiful but big .  Now hopefully I can get out here at least one more time this fall…