Solstice Celebration (wtihout Rob)

My Friday off fell nearly adjacent to the summer solstice, which of course meant it was time to fish until dark. With Rob off in Peru fishing at the equivalent of the top of Mt. Rainier, I found an old friend, Trevor Larson, to accompany me. He had not fly-fished in years, and is one of the few who actually followed through and called me on an offer to take him sometime.

We left in the evening, after Trevor had finished looking in peoples' mouths and I had completed nearly a full day of honey-dos, helpful when you are going to be gone until long after dark. We climbed the steep road through the rolling wheat fields to the astounding elevation of 1,660 feet (take that, Rob!), where we found a beautiful and familiar stream. I had both my 3-weights rigged and ready with the CGPPN -what else to use? Me with a size 12 and 16, Trevor with a size 14; I thought it wise not to give a newbie two flies, that's asking for trouble.

I slipped into the water, and had a couple fish to hand in the time it took Trevor to follow down the rocks and make it over to me. Yup, I love this place. With a little coaching, he soon was getting reasonable dead drifts, handling the slack in the line as it came towards him on the upstream casts, and finding fish like this one, his first of the day.

Trevor's first trout after a long hiatus from fly-fishing

As usual, the upstream pace was excruciatingly slow, because there were so many fish. I'd want to move up to the next run, but how could you when you were still having a fish nearly every cast? The trout were even prettier than I remembered in the past, many with deep red color. 

Beautifully colored rainbow

Size was good, probably more than half in the 8" to 11" range, with the assortment of flyers and chesters, and the occasional one pushing 12". As usual, fish were often in the shallow water at the edge of the moving water as well as in fast water lest than a foot deep. We also found lots in the few deeper pools. In one little pool at the side of a fast run, I had two doubles along with maybe 20 fish or more, while Trevor kept pulling them out of the riffle on the other side of the fast water. I told him he couldn't use the excuse that I caught twice as many fish as he did because I didn't let him use two flies!

I finally left that little pool when the fish started getting small, and it was approaching nightfall. There was still some good water upstream to hit. We continued up, finding fish everywhere they were supposed to be, and a few where you wouldn't think they would be. Trevor sat in one little fast riffle and probably caught 20 fish before things slowed down. As it became too dark to see, Trevor climbed out to the path, but I needed just a couple more in a beautiful run we had just reached. With the sunglasses, I couldn't see anything on the water, so I cast blindly, and found two more nice ones stripping the indicator in, then stumbled to shore through the now black water which hid all the rocks underneath. Walking back to the car, we both had big smiles. It took us 2 1/2 hours to fish through a quarter mile of stream, and between us we probably found 150 fish. How could you not have a big smile! Happy summer solstice!

Another of many beautiful fish