Hopper Birthday!

It's that time of year when Tom and I get together to find some trout to celebrate our one-day-apart birthdays at the beginning of August. Boy did we ever find the trout this year.

Twelve and a half hours fishing with no stops at our favorite Nunya Creek. The morning started a little slow with the hoppers and nymphs, as we often find it does. In one of the large pools there was a school of a dozen or more fish feeding on tiny emerging flies with no interest in bigger bites like the hopper. Fun to watch. A little later approaching 9 am, we came to a run Tom said never seems to produce fish any more. We promptly caught seven, Tom on the Moorish hopper, me on the October caddis jig head nymph. From then on, it was pretty consistent action all the way to quitting time 10 1/2 hours later.

Tom fished the hopper exclusively, I followed his hopper with my nymph when the water was big enough with a lot of success; otherwise, we took turns running our hoppers along the banks.

For the day we had in the range of 60 to hand, consistently fat, 13 to 19 inch rainbows and browns, with a few more than a dozen measured from 20 to 23 inches. Big, powerful fish in a small stream. Nothing like watching a 20-plus inch trout slowly approach your hopper, slurp it in, then explode out of the water as you set the hook. 

Or in Tom's case, disappear with your hopper as your tippet parts. It's hard to call it an off day when you get 30 fish including multiple 20-inch plus to hand, but for Tom, it was an off day or he would have had 40. He broke flies off in a half dozen fish pushing 20-plus inches, missed many more with nary a tug on the line (we temporarily renamed the 5 fish hole the 5 miss hole...). That's pretty normal for me, but for Tom, it looks like he's gotten a little rusty. Maybe he was missing the guides at Christmas Island who'd spot the bonefish and tell him when to set the hook...

We ended the day in the evening light finding big trout in the middle of long stretches of dead water, quite different from the normal hugging of the grassy bank to find fish. Long, upstream cast of the hopper, watch a big trout arch out of the water and drop on the fly, then fight it in while your brother tosses up to find the next one (we had a number of doubles). Throw in sighting of an otter, a porcupine in the tree right over our heads above the creek, and a female moose trotting up the hill away from the creek, and it was a pretty epic day. Definitely a hopper birthday!