AJ's day

There are days where you simply aren't on your game, while those around you are stepping up beyond what you expect of them. Yesterday started out with so many positives and was immensely enjoyable. We tagged everything we saw, it was great. Trout came past us one by one on their cruising cycles and we flipped flies and they took them. The stream was tiny, sometimes only 3 or 4 feet across. For all the years we've fly fished together, Amelia had never had to do a bow & arrow cast. Yesterday she did, and did a great job of it. It was great to see, without so much as a snag in a tree and trout to hand doing it. Perfect. As the day continued, she kept catching her fish, I got stuck with a hapless series of events. My fish were either spooked by paradise ducks flapping through the run, sending the trout all over, cows stampeding beside the banks spooking trout, or the trout were in stillwater bath tubs, cycling around eating everything in no particular or predictable motion. One fish I worked for 90 minutes, getting 3 takes. Each of the three takes offered something different. On the first, I lost sight of my fly and missed the take in the glare - even though AJ told me to set. Trouble was a tractor in a farm field was right beside me and I couldn't hear a thing she said. The next take the video shows the fish simply missed the spent spinner. The third take I was simply using a long leader to a subsurface emerger and wasn't totally sure the fish had taken. Hell, the fish even came up to take a tiny natural at one point and got tangled in my tippet, swam thrashing through the pool to get disengaged. And it kept feeding as though nothing happened. Spooky trout... nope. After the last missed take we moved on. 90 yards upstream Amelia's fish waited and the second cast the fish took the nymph. A 4.5 pound trout on this tiny stream. She'd already landed others near and above 5. The best part is that when it came to the photos and the video, hers rocked. It was awesome to watch her fish and great to see her video work at the end of the day. Now, if I can just get my game back up for tomorrow... or maybe she can have my fish.  :)