Saturday, January 10, 2015

Reflecting on 2014 - best trout days

My trout days last year were spent entirely in small cold streams flowing from the mountains of northern New Hampshire.  While fishing from my float tube in local farm ponds for sunfish (see prior post) were solo adventures, trout fishing for me means driving north for the day (a long day) with one or more friends.  It also means a (very!) big breakfast along the way, with fishing beginning in late morning and extending until dark.

I pulled the images below from several of last summer's trout trips.

All fishing was done with an 8 foot 4 weight.  However, the line weight makes little difference for this kind of fishing because rarely is there more than 3 feet of fly line hanging from the tip of the rod.  Add an 8 foot leader and that's plenty of reach for these small streams, generally. (8 foot rod + 3 feet of line + 8 foot leader = potential maximum reach of 19 feet. Realistically, that's plenty for a stream that is 6 to 12 feet wide.)

Warning:  The trout in the small cold nearly-sterile mountain streams of northern New Hampshire are small. A 9" brookie is always well-remembered.




So I can see them, I make my parachutes VERY bushy.
This is my first choice fly.  Body is peacock herl.
Tied with or without a tail,
I cannot tell a difference in productivity.



Paul







Jim






One of Paul's elk hair caddis parachutes.
These are my second choice fly.
When I run out, Paul ties up some more for me!

The Mount Washington Hotel

3 comments:

David Hutton said...

Rib sticking breakfasts!
The fly of choice has an interesting placement of the hackle and parachute - center if the hook shank.

Peter F. said...

Haha. Fortunately no cholesterol problems for me! Plus it just makes for a nice memory. The parachute? Yes, bushy and in the center. I do that often when there is no tail to add rear end support on the water. Since most of the hook weight in on the rear of the fly it just makes sense to me... It is harder to make a tapered body. However, I'm usually tying with a bushy herl body for these trips as I think it looks more like a terrestrial of some kind... there is very little going on in the way of hatches during the day

Brk Trt said...

Beautiful streams, and those wild jewels awesome.
Alan