First Day of Fall Coho

My buddy Jason stayed over, we fished and scouted the Rouge the day before. Up at 5am on Sunday, grabbed the best run we found special-opps style. Fish were stirring, but nothing consistent until a little after first light. I tried swinging a black and blue bad hair day, and then some comets with no luck. After seeing a couple fish breaking the surface, I tied on a moose hair muddler. This hen took it on the hang down.

Shortly after Jason tied on a strange double fly/spawn bag rig he had pulled out of snag. We were pretty sure this is what the father and son were using that we'd watched fish this run yesterday. A spawn bag, two small simple old school looking streamers with mallard wings and the remnants of wax worms on the hooks. I handed him a Thing-a-ma-bobber that I randomly happen to have in my pocket. This was more of a joke than anything, but amazing he landed a real nice little Rouge brown on it.

Summertime, And the livin' is easy, Fish are jumpin'

Our new baby stroller works best on paved trails, so the family and I headed up the road to one of the small towns north of us. A live blues band was playing and Emmy got to do some dancing. Did a little recon work while we were there. Lots of browns and a few large resident rainbows trying to head up stream, maybe in search of cooler headwaters?

Panorama of the Dam site - Where can I swing a fly?

Mr. Brown

The following are some animated gifs...

These guys...

End of Spring Steelhead Season 2013

I'm officially done chasing chrome until the summer runs starts...next month.  I hope to hit the St. Joe for the first time this summer.  On my last trip searching for steelhead, I caught this obese little brown on a swung Kevin Fennstra fly - the psycho sculpin. I was using a bass/bullet weight to get it down fast.

I'm surprised by how many of these aggressive little  10"-12" browns there are in the lower Rouge right now.  Imagine if they made a section catch and release only...we'd have a bunch of big aggressive browns in a few years.

Fishing - May 12th, 2013

I got on the Rouge River just after 7am.  I was looking for chrome, but almost instantly had some Rouge River gold on the end of my line.




















 I fished for a few hours and must have rolled a dozen or more browns, but only ended up bringing two to hand.  So goes streamer fishing especially when you're looking for bigger fish.

There were still Steelhead in the river, some kids fishing downstream from me hooked two and brought in one. They were using Mepps spinners.  I saw one splashing by a shallow log jam and gave it a few swings, but it wasn't interested in playing, so I moved on.

This streamer ended up being my best fly all weekend.  Both on the Flat for smallmouth and browns on the Rouge.  It's just a little white Arctic Fox, silver flashabou, pearl crystal flash topped with some peakcock herl on a size 6 Gamakatsu B10s.  I used a fishskull head, but stuck eyes on it from the next size larger head.  I'm thinking this hook isn't a good match for the smaller browns on the Rouge.  The gap is too large.  I missed tons of fish and I didn't like the way it hooked the ones I did land.  It was a little too damaging.