Each time we fish we should learn something, regardless of how insignificant or seemingly unimportant. My most recent trip with Carpy and Oldtrout at the Bidwell Ranch was a perfect example. This report contains NO fishporn, so if you are looking for pictures of big fish, or even small fish, you are out of luck. Kind of like we were when our expectations were crushed. Again, the fish were smarter than we and proved it again and again, for four straight days.
Carpy and I arrived on Monday late afternoon. After setting up the trailer and watching the fish for a while we had a good dinner of some homemade Minestrone Soup accompanied by some French bread and root beer. The next day dawned bright and sunny and Carpy roared out of bed at an early (for him) 8:45 am. After coffee and breakfast we headed out fishing. The fishing was tremendous. The catching was a bit lacking. Remember all those flies I tied for this outing when I was obsessed??? Well, most of them will wait until late spring, next year. There was an excellent hatch of Callibaetis but the fish were not keying on them. However, they were regularly sipping midges and midge clusters. Leave it to say, I had not tied any of those patterns. We finally keyed on to what the fish were taking on the third day, being stubborn and not believing that they could leave all those mayflies float away unharmed. They did take a PT on a floating line with a slow strip retrieve occasionally, but you had to put the fly almost on their nose to get a take. Lunchboy, aka: Oldtrout, finally showed up late in the day on Tuesday bearing our long lost lunch, so I fed him a little leftover soup and then started dinner while he and Carpy fished the close pond. That night’s dinner was Oxtail Stew, mashed potatoes, salad, and a pretty decent Chianti. After dinner, Oldtrout got the dishes done and we joined together at the campfire to tell stories. Carpy has heard most of mine so I regaled Oldtrout with some repeats. He told really old bad jokes in return.
Oldtrout doing after dinner dishes. Rule of camp is that the cook doesn’t do dishes, thus I cook a LOT!
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