Another Small Stream Outing

With the success that Dyllon and I had recently experienced small stream fishing, we decided to get out again for another quite outing, this time exploring a little further upstream. After putting some distance between where we ended on our last trip, we found a nice spot where the creek paralleled the trail and headed down to the water. There ended up being a huge log jam at on the creek, forming a great looking hole and while Dyllon made his way downstream, I decided to see if there were any fish hiding under the logs. After a couple casts I got my leech imitation in tight against the logs, let it sink an when I stripped it back a nice ~16" Cutthroat slowly followed it out. I gave the leech a few good twitches, but as my line near the rod tip the Cutthroat must have seen me and shot back under the logs. After that, no amount of casting could get the Cutthroat to come back out and after several fruitless minutes I had to admit defeat and head downstream.

I found Dyllon at a nice corner hole where he was getting grabs on his streamer on almost every cast, but similar to my fish they just weren't willing to commit. After switching spots, I ran into the same issue on my streamer, but finally enticed a fish to grab my dry, which ended up being a beautiful little Coastal Cutthroat.

A beautiful golden yellow native Coastal Cutthroat

Continuing downstream, the creek had a good amount of pools and pocket water, but the fish proved to be challenging. As with the first hole, we got lots of grabs at each piece of good water on our streamers, but the fish all seemed to be short striking and hook ups were few and far between. Unfortunately the deepest, best looking water all seemed to be oddly vacant but signs angling pressure abounded with gear in the trees, suggesting overharvest by local anglers to be the culprit.

A nice corner hole on the stream

Luckily the smaller pools and pockets appear to be over looked by other anglers and the dry-dropper rig proved effective, although it only produced fish in 6" to 8" range. Hoping that we would connect with some of the larger fish we had found on our last trip, we continued down to the hole where we had caught them. This time, Dyllon briefly hooked up with on decent fish perhaps around 12" but it popped off and no other fish were willing to grab. A couple corners downstream the trail and the creek met up again and after having spent a couple hours exploring with limited success we decided to call it a day While we didn't land any large Cutthroat this trip, there were lots hookups and the dry fly proved hard to resist for the smaller Cutthroat, making it a great day on the water.