Early Spring Fishing

Dave and I headed west yesterday to check on a favorite spring creek of ours. We arrived to find most of the creek open and the water running clear and low, but for a few thin ice patches along the shoreline. We did our usual slow walk, looking intently for holding trout in hopes of casting our dry flies to one or two. Instead we hooked a few on streamers as there wasn't enough sun to make the early stones active. In one section of the creek, Dave spotted a 20 inch male holding on the bottom of the creek just below the thin ice shelf. He dangled his fly onto the ice edge and gave it a twitch to drop it into the open water below. A few strips of the fly through the fishes zone to try to induce a strike, but nothing.This fish didn't budge and we soon realized that most of the bigger fish in the creek were still spent from last fall's spawn and in recovery mode. One brown we came across had a huge repala gash on it's nose and it moved more like a pike than a healthy active brown. They might as well have had a sign on their backs that said, " I won't play today, so just leave me alone." We did. Our hopes of casting dry flies wasn't meant to be as the sunny, 13 +C day they forecasted turned cloudy and windy. These are the ever changing days of early spring.