March is off to a great start

Finally Spring is on its way! Saturday was my first free Saturday for quite some time, and given the recent warm temps, I thought it'd be a great day to hit up a freestone brookie stream. Temps in Lancaster were in the 50s for the first half of the week, and even though Saturday barely broke 40 degrees, the water temps were holding. I took a stream temp when I first arrived on the stream and it was reading 42 degrees. Air temp at the time was 39.

I was fishing a dry dropper. I used a stimulator for my surface fly and a San Juan Worm (pink w/ a bead) for my dropper. It didn't take long to hook into my first brookie. The first pool I casted into, I hooked up with a little beauty! The first hole is right where I park, and I like to see if I can get anything out of it because its quite a difficult hole to approach. It's frog water, and wading up into casting distance can be a challenge. If you're not careful, you will send wakes the whole way up the hole and ruin the entire stretch. If you can approach it w/out spooking the fish though, the hole has many brookies piled up in it. After getting my first brookie, I hopped out of the stream, walked back the patch about a half mile and here the stream splits into two streams. I first worked my way up the left stream. There were several dead stretches but eventually I got up into a series of plunge pools and large boulders. This is my favorite kind of fishing. I hiked up above the large boulders to where the stream is all but a trickle and worked my way back down. I found the best approach is to climb up on the boulders and hide behind them, then drop my fly down into the plunges and pools, and drag them back towards me. Here, the brookies were just going nuts. Lots of strikes on both the dry fly and the dropper. You know Spring is right around the corner when the brookies start coming up for the dries.

Eventually I made it back down to where the stream splits, and I worked my way up the right stream in much the same fashion. There's a stretch with large boulders and plunges, and I hiked above them and worked my way back down. I had an amazing 10"+ brookie on at one point but lost him as I was getting my camera out! It was good to know that fish like that are still in this stream though, as this stream took some serious hits during the floods of 2010.

I landed a dozen fish and hooked into a dozen more. It was a great few hours for a cold March day. I'm glad to be off and running with my brook trout count for 2013! Oh I almost forgot...these are the first fish caught on my Eagle Claw Featherlight. Glad to break in the rod with such beautiful fish.