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The quiet jolt at a perfect site for fly-fishing
It's that moment when a trout grabs your dry fly. It starts when you see the trout rise before you feel the grab. A millisecond later, the trout jolts you, and it's almost an electric sensation, as if you are wired directly to the fish. For a lot of people who fly-fish, it's the single most exciting moment in all sport. This is better than watching any sport because here you are the participant, not the observer. And the way you take this to the highest level is by casting a dry fly to wild fish in a pristine wilderness stream. That is what has always led me back to the Middle Fork San Joaquin River, high in the Sierra in the Ansel Adams Wilderness, the best place in the West to try and catch the grand slam of wild trout in a single day: rainbow trout, brook trout, golden trout, brown trout and a strange-looking hybridized mix I called the "golden-brook." Even though the trout are not large here, you have a chance to get 20 to 50 grabs in a day.
You've probably caught used trout
Despite opening-day images of stringers hanging full of and creels packed with dead trout, a pair of newly released studies show anglers in Pennsylvania release most of the trout they catch. According to Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission/Penn State studies, anglers fishing stocked trout streams in the spring caught about one trout per hour and released 63.1 percent of those fish. Similarly, during the course of the legal fishing season on wild trout waters, average catch rates varied from around one fish every two hours for brook and brown trout on large streams to nearly two brook trout per hour (1.76 fish per hour) on small streams. Anglers released 92.7 percent of those wild trout. "In evaluating fisheries, we consider average catch rates of one trout for two hours of fishing time as 'good.' The fact that both wild trout fisheries and stocked waters averaged, and in many cases far surpassed, this measure is exciting," commission executive director Doug Austen said.
‘Goodby, God, I'm going to Bodie,' or ‘Good by God, I'm going ...
BODIE - About the same time each year for the past 14, a group of Hi-Desert athletes, this writer and his friend of almost 30 years, Dean Gill, an employee of the Eastern Municipal Water District set sail for the eastern High Sierra north of Bishop.We stay in a three-story town house in Mammoth Lakes, then travel to lakes and streams from the Virginia Lakes Loop on the north (occasionally Upper Twin Lake near Bridgeport) to Rock Creek and Rock Creek Lake on the south.It's a 10-day adventure that has seen a number of the young men who annually make the trip become outstanding fly fishermen - to the point where the movie “A River Runs Through It" is totally enjoyable.A Page From HistoryDuring the adventure we've dubbed the “Corps of Discovery," we take one day of the 10 to spend in the ghost town of Bodie.We discover annually that it wasn't trout fishing that resulted in the growth of this awesome area, but gold and silver discoveries that made many millionaires, while leaving so many with empty pockets.
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