Old Flame

4/14/2010

With all the attention that I've been giving The Blacksmith, I decided it was about time I visited my old love, The Logan. I had to stop for a guard duck at the mouth of the canyon, but eventually he let me pass. I drove past The Right Hand Fork a ways, finally settling on some rather attractive pocket water. I hiked down from my car for a decent while, trying to find an easy access point. I bushwhacked my way down to the river and soon hooked a nice little brown on my new attractor from a shallow riffle.

I pulled another brown of pretty much the same size out of that same riffle on my new dropper, "The Timmy." Another clone came to the net on the attractor just upstream of the others. At this point I suddenly realized that wearing my jacket was a stifling, sweaty, awful affair, and that I needed to ditch it ASAP. So I walked all the way back to my car, and then all the way back down to where I'd left off. I fished past a few minor spots with nothing, and then scored this pretty cutthroat on the dry from a nice flat run.

I worked my way upstream, eventually coming to some really deep long runs I'd been salivating over on the walk down. I got a few refusals from cutts on the dry, but no solid hookups. I could see some ridiculously huge whitefish on the bottom and decided to work on them for a bit. I missed one, but for the most part, they didn't want anything to do with me. That was kind of a disappointment, but I soldiered on. I came upon a nice little pocket up against a hollowed out part of a boulder and scored this sexy thing on a green and black Copper P Tail.

After that it all kind of blurred together. BWOS were coming off, and I even saw a few caddis. I lost my attractor to a tree and switched over to a big orange Turk's. I scored this stout little fellow on it somewhere in there.

At the tail of a fast little pocket, I scored this healthy brown on the Turk's. It went airborne several times (as most of the browns did that day) and took me downstream about fifty feet. I clambered over several boulders, amazingly not falling to my death, or at least to my embarrassment, before finally netting him.

I saw a lot of nice sized fish rising around this time, and I really should have tried to match the hatch a bit more closely, but I was lazy and running out of time. I still scored a few more fish, but had a ton of refusals. With about ten minutes left, I came upon a long deep run that was full of dozens of nice cutthroat greedily rising to the hatch. I had a lot of looks, and a few misses, but I only ended up landing this guy,

and a smaller brown. About this time, four carloads of college students came galumphing by, putting the fish down. It had to head to work anyway, so I hurried off.

Final Tally: 14 Browns and Cutthroat

Year Tally: 129 Fish