Long Overdue

I know it's been quite some time since I've made a post. Part of that is laziness, part of it is being insanely busy, part of it is I feel like I rehash the same experience time and time again. "Oh I fished for brookies last night, caught x amount of fish, it was fun." I'm a small stream fisherman. It's what I do. It ain't that exciting to most people, but it's what I love. Squatchin' around in the woods, catching natives, it's perfect to me.

So in early June I headed up to Potter County (God's Country) with the family for a week long vacation. This was the highlight of my summer so far. You can see my photo dump from the trip below. Since this was a family vacation, my fishing time was limited. My wife wasn't keen on sitting around the cabin all day every day with a toddler and a 4yr old while I'm out pounding the streams. I promised my wife I would not do this to her. Instead, I got up at 5:30am every day on my vacation, fished any one of the multitudes of small streams that are within a 10 minute drive of my cabin, and was back in time to eat breakfast with my wife and kids. A few days I snuck out for a couple of hours in the afternoon.

I've been fishing this area of the state as long as I can remember, and I've been fly fishing it since I was 16 years old. In all of my years of fishing, I have never seen the fishing so good.  Every single stream had great flows. The temps were perfect. Most of the days, the skies were overcast, if not a little drizzly. Every pool held fish. Every run produced strikes. When I think about fly fishing in Potter County, I dream of weeks like this.

This summer is a rare event in the life of a North Eastern fly fisherman. The solid amount of rain, the relatively cooler temps ("relative" is the key word...we just had a full week of solid heat indexes of 100 degrees), it has produced a fishing experience that I've not seen in quite some time. You'll forgive the lack of posts from me...I've been busy fishin.