Top 15 Canadian Moments 2012 - #5 - Return to sender

Pierre & his wife, Karen had planned to fish with me in July. July was kind of wet. Kinda ugly. The morning we met in Rocky Mountain House was ugly. The blackest skies. The wind was howling. The forecast had heavy rain. I had just driven through some heavy rain. Ugly heavy rain. Well, a humor filled, ugly kind of rain anyway. I was able to take this photo of the rain on the drive out. Apparently the grain elevator decided to take a quick rainbow-pee before the storm set in!

So, we canned plans for the day & rescheduled for Sept. It just wasn't going to be a good day - and it wasn't.
September came and we again met up. It was a fabulous September this year, the kind that makes you yearn for Sept all year. It was as good as New Zealand fishing, just a different scale of fish and different species / dynamics, of course.

We headed up to fish cutthroat trout for the day. Again, low, clear water and perfect weather for spotting in the canyon. The day did not disappoint. It started as all Sept cutthroat trout days do - sighting them deep in the pools and nymphing with little action on top. By noon in the canyon the sun has peaked over and acts like it found its best friend - a big, bright smile and warm hug.
The first sighted fish was in a seam and quite active. Karen was with me and we practised sighting and casting to the fish. First cast in, her dry - dropper sat on the water on the slack edge. The dark shape came up from the depths to her fly. "Here it comes!" Sure enough, the big, dark, red cheeked male smoked the dry. She missed. Ah well. We worked another nice trout and it took but we missed the subtle take. At the top of the slot, a big cutt whumped the nymph. Bugga again on that one. Fun!

The day went amazingly. We spent time together, watching each other fish. I was able to really put them onto some great sight-fishing moments, with cutts holding on rocks, edges of troughs, slots, at tailouts, in head seams, all sorts of neat stuff. A few fish were caught blind, but 90% were sight-fished then engaged. It was a lot of fun because the pace to the day, their happy contentment to let me do my thing and find fish for them, the conditions, everything was wonderful.

Some nice fish were caught, certainly. Funny, in catching so many big browns the past several years both in New Zealand and Alberta, along with those fat brookies, sizes of cutthroat aren't that important. Big cutts are still big cutts, but you don't generally go fishing to catch monsters.

It was toward the end of the day when that day tied in to the #5 moment of the season, however. We came upon a pool with 5 nice cutthroat feeding. I think we managed to land three. Pierre hooked into the largest fish twice, missing both times. We could see it feeding, then chasing another around the pool a couple of times. After first hooking it, it simply went back to feeding along the wall while Pierre focused on the other fish before returning to it, missing another take. Again, he focused on another fish. The bigger one returned to feeding and again Pierre cast over. This time, after another great cast, the fish took once more. It was a nice cutt, in that 20" range.

After a good fight, the tippet broke! 
Ugh.

We made our way out of the canyon after that, leaving it to a fish story.

Two or three days later I hosted Brian on his 4 days of fishing. We wanted to do a sight-fishing day on a cutthroat river. We did the same reach of water, just coming at it from lower down. Sure enough
our day ended at that pool as well. And this time only 3 trout were in the pool, in the same exact positions they held 2 or 3 days previous.

Brian prceeded to land a nice 20" cutt. And as it came to the net, I noticed something and smiled. When I got home, I emailed Pierre this photo of his flies that we removed from Brian's nice, fat cutthroat: