A Good Day on the River

Today we hit the river again. It is nice being able to cut out of work about 3pm, be on the river by 3:30, and into fish soon after that. The Owyhee River can get crowded as it's secret seems to be out of the bag, and with spring break going on, and the Skwalas expected to burst on the scene any day we weren't sure what to expect this afternoon. We found a couple customary runs empty and tried a couple new one's and found fish in each place. I used a Fluttering Skwala pattern I tied up a few of this weekend (I will post a picture sometime soon as I really like the pattern courtesy of the Trout Lie) with a Zebra Midge dropper, and most of my action was on the zebra midge. I did have quite few noses up on the skwala pattern though.

Other than catching fish the only other story of note from the day happened as daylight was fading. There was a small pod of fish rising along the opposite bank from me under a good sized bush that hung over the edge of the river. I worked out some line and threw a nice cast just upstream of the bush and was getting a perfect drift through where the fish had been rising. Suddenly a small bird dive bombed my fly from the bush. It grabbed it in it's beak and tried to fly back up into the bush but quickly realized this did not feel like a bug and dropped it. The comotion caused by that little bird certainly put the feeding fish down and ruined any shot at catching them but I had to laugh and take it as a compliment to my newbie tying abilities. Not only did I fool fish by tying a fly that looked real from below, it looked good enough to fool a bird with a top view. I'll take what I can get these days.

The fish I caught today were much more healthy looking than the fish I caught last week. Numbers were up as well. Overall I ended up landing 7 in the few hours we spent on the water. Here are a couple pictures: