Saturday morning I woke up and it was 21 degrees outside so I went fishing. Blair and Greg would be glad to spout off about my "Natural Resource Withdrawal". It may be true, and my response is "Who is actually catching fish, and who is just thinking about it?". I have no problem wearing two pairs of long underwear in order to catch fish.There was a middle-aged fisherman at a pull-off in George Washington National Forest, sitting in his running classic unmarked white work-van with ladder, waiting for the temp to rise a little. When I pulled up, he got out and talked for a bit about trout fishing strategies in the cold. He said his wife and friends thought he was nuts, he took a swig of his coffee put on his gloves and said "Pussies, all of 'em - a day like today separates the men from the boys". Here is a shot of Passage Creek I encountered that morning.
I started fishing a little after nine. Yes - it was that cold, that is a frozen spinner, the same thing happened to my line. I had to let the sun come over ridge until I saw a fish, they were a bit dormant and keeping under the ice ledges.
Once it warmed up, this is the upper part of the hole I caught two fish in (after several hours of thawing). I crept so slowly as not to spook the fish and I sight fished the whole day. I watched each trout I caught take the lure (and more often than not pass it by) I fished this one hole for close to three hours as I watched trout come and go.
The two rainbows caught came from the above hole. I caught them on two different plastic jigs. I had to horse them up onto the ice to pull them in (yes thats ice at the bottom), it was too far to net them.
My creel for the day, two Rainbows and a Brown, the Brown (at top) came from just above the previous hole. I crept up on him and two other trout, within 10 feet in the middle of the creek, calf deep in the water and watched him chase the spinner a few feet and then another cast caught him chasing hard and he took it about 5 feet from me. the other two wouldn't look at anything I threw.
What a great, yet tough day of fishing, I worked for those fish. I only ran into a few other fisherman. I was the only one who caught anything. This is a view upstream of where I decided to hike back to the road, theres another few miles of this section of the creek, I only covered about a mile. Ah, more left to explore. Tight lines.
