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

A few images from my day-trip to northern NH [Sep 19]

On Sunday the 19th, my friend Paul and I drove to northern New Hampshire for a day of fishing.  Unfortunately the water was a bit cooler and a bit higher than we were hoping for. As it turned out it was a great day of fishing but a poor day of catching! 

We each tagged a couple of bigger trout (stockies) in the morning and I did manage a couple of pictures (a rainbow and a brookie, posted below).  Each was caught with a parachute fly with a brightly colored post.  Mine had a pink post. Paul was using an orange post. 

That's Paul below drifting a dryfly:

In the early evening we picked up a handful of the smaller fish, as a caddis hatch broke out just before sunset. One of my most pleasant surprises was the picture immediately below.  It was actually three images overlapped and combined in photoshop to create a vertical panorama, though it has been cropped to a more normal aspect ratio.  I did this because the camera lens was not wide-angle enough to capture the water falling in the foreground plus the beautiful sky.

Additional Images (for non-New Englanders, that is the Mt. Washington Hotel at the bottom):