Weather wise November 5th was one of the most pleasant days of the year to fish, 59 degrees at 9:00 with an afternoon high in the 70’s. There were brief periods of cloud cover throughout the day, but mostly the sky was as blue as a robin’s egg that fell to a red and gold ridge line. Viewed from the creek these colors melded surrounding the valley in endless folds of burnt orange.
Joining me on this great day were TU members; Joe Robinson, Jed Feffer, Dave Wittman, James Greene, Lance Flood, George Owens, Nick Weber and guest fishers Brad Ipsen and Martin Romeo. We met briefly at the upper parking lot before splitting into two groups, one group fishing up stream from the lower parking lot, the other fishing down from Country Store Lane.
Fishing downstream from the upper parking area takes you through a suburban setting of large homes with manicured back yards. A spring boils out from under a tree that overhangs the stream near the starting point where several trout could be seen grubbing and flashing amongst its tangle of submerged roots. The stream then meanders through the many new improvements retaining its suburban flavor until it intersects the Beaver Creek Church Road Bridge; in this upper section , Jim, Dave, and George reported taking fish on copper Johns and flash back pheasant tails. Down stream of the bridge suburbia gives way to a more bucolic setting of farm land with huge barns, pasture and grain fields. At this point casting becomes tighter. Timber lining the bank and tall weeds just seem to reach out and catch your fly on the back cast. Coming up from the lower parking lot the stream has a much different appearance. The well marked path ends just below a beaver dam where above the water is deep, slow, and has a greenish cast to it. A careful casting technique is in order here as well to escape the fly hungry flora. It was in this water that Larry Coburn’s deer hair cress bug pattern seemed to turn the trick, accounting for at least 4 fish that I know of. Two of the better ones were a fat 15" rainbow that Nick took just above the dam slowly twitching his bug along the bottom, and a slender 16" bow I took off a cress bed holding in a slot between the elodea. Later in the afternoon Nick saw a fish rising in a pool at the foot of an old mill ruin, tied on a #12 attractor pattern that produced a splashy rise from a feisty 13" bow, that I think was the only dry fly trout of the day. The reported size of fish caught ranged from 3" to 16".
Dennis Covert
Outings
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