Fronted again

It was +19.5C when AJ & I closed the car door to walk down to the stream. The 11am forecast was for steady temps for RMH, with wind downgraded t0 N20kmh, with showers. PERFECT. We arrived at the water and immediately a 19" brown was rising along a weed bed, far bank. It didn't take much to hook him up. We moved upstream and AJ had a taker on a dropper system she'd rigged. Just a few yards upstream we sighted a 17" brown at the head of a trough, holding beside a rock on the bottom. AJ's first cast was to its right, which would have needed the brown to move into shallower water to feed. No dice. Her second cast led upstream left, and drift into the slot. The trout met the nymph bang on. We moved up to find a brown holding in another slot. I used her dropper system as it wasn't moving. A nice drift, the fish met it mid column. A good day. 10 yards further, to a favorite corner pool and 3 trout rising. All three hooked up with us rotating. Another bankside under a spruce overhang tight to the bank. I hooked up. We moved up to another bankside trout in a trough. AJ missed the take to the dry on my rod. We thought no chance of it coming back to the dry, which it didn't, but I climbed atop the bank to see if I could spot it. It had moved 3 feet upstream of the tree root it had originally taken downstream of. She switched to the dropper. As I sighted for her, a 25" male with a flagging tail moved in to the slot immediately to the right and shallower in the water column. It was a leading candidate for a cast, but AJ's fish was the deeper, outside fish.

Now, this would be a good time to mention that Red Deer's forecast was substantially different than that of RMH. It called for a weather anomaly - drastically falling temps due to a cold low trough, and high winds and heavy rain. As AJ began to work this fish, the lightning strikes were less than a mile away and drizzle began. By the time she had the dropper set up rod in her hand, the wind was beginning to swirl, the rain intense.

Her cast went in perfect line to the smaller brown. Out of consideration of me, when it took the nymph she ripped it out of the hold and forced it downstream. The lightning grew fierce, above us. The wind chopped at the water. The rain heavy. Her fish a scant 21" female. :)  Joy!  But, as the rain fell and wind swept the water, I watched the flagging tail of the large male, certain at 25" perhaps 26". It simply swam upstream to a deep undercut trough. It was the last fish we saw as the rain hammered at us for an hour before we left the relative comfort of the spruce tree we stood under and headed home.

On the drive home, two and a half hours after leaving the car (recall it was 19.5C), we drove home at +8C. A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post wondering why I bothered to fish through a massive pressure and temperature swing post thunderstorm. It happened again today. Oddly, I was fishing the same water today as I did 3 weeks ago when it last happened! This time, though, I didn't keep fishing. Fool me once... that's all I gave this time!

Life, eh? And, now, upon arriving home, the forecast is for up to 4" of rain by Wed. Ah, life, eh? A good day to work on the video production tomorrow... or fish a lake. :)