Spring as it was meant to be...

I needed to get one more day of fishing before my license expired, so I called Tom and suggested we check out the early season on Lenore, then head to Dusty if there was time.  The day was absolutely gorgeous - calm, sunny, warming as the sun got higher in the sky.  But Lenore was a bust, with murky water from the spring turnover and no apparent action from fish near the shore.  We quickly left and headed for Dusty.  It was a beautiful hike as always.  We met an LDS troop from Issaquah camped there, and I got to explain to them a little about the Ice Age Floods that carved out this unique area.  We even found a few fish, though nothing spectacular.  I believe the fishing on the shore peaks a little earlier, about the third week in March; either that or there are too many people making the hike down from the put and take lakes and hauling out more fish than allowed.  Regardless, we had fun sight fishing to a few of the fish that were cruising the shore, and got our share of the beautiful sunshine.  Fish were really fat with bulging bellies.



I'm fishing and you're not

Tom said that the unspoken message of this post was, "Rick I went fishing today, and you didn't" so rather than write something flowery that delicately makes the point I'll just say it.

We headed to the Methow before dawn seeking steelhead and had no success at bridge and fish weren't visible.  We went up to Winthrop and fished below the bridge and Tom found this nice cutthroat trout.  He thought it might be a small steelhead until he saw the slashes on the throat.

Pretty fish, sunny day, good company.  It rarely gets better than this!  Of course, Rob didn't catch a fish so the previous sentence implies that he rarely catches fish.