Winter rises

Have you ever taken a trip to your favorite river, left your fly rod at home on purpose, and just spent some time observing what goes on there?  It is a good exercise and one I do a couple times a year at least.  When I am on the river fishing there are definite lessons to be learned but still much can be missed when the focus is turned to the desired result of catching fish rather than on the process that brought that fish to the surface to begin with.  Taking time to truly focus on simply watching what goes on during a hatch is a learning experience that can pay dividends on future trips.

Today I felt the itch to get out and do a little poking around up the canyon.  It has been a couple months since I have taken a real fishing trip out here to the river I hit 2-3 times a week during the summer months.  The river that I last fished with the summer sun beating down on it, and with grasshoppers overtaking the surrounding willows has changed quite a bit.  A stretch of cold weather and a real good snow storm meant the slow stretches were covered in ice and the surrounding landscape was covered in a fresh white cloak.  The river is beautiful, but it no longer is teaming with insect life and visible signs of fish in the river are far less abundant.  The hoppers have long ago been killed off but there is a bug that hatches this time of year that will still bring these fish to the top.  The midge.

As I drove the long winding road along the icy river today though I saw no tell tale rings on the glassy waters surface that would indicate fish were taking advantage of this winter time snack.  Finally at one of my favorite holes to fish in the early mornings up here in the summer I spotted the first rise ring of the day.  I hopped out of the truck with my camera and went about doing a little recon.

There are at least 6 rise forms visible in this picture (Click the picture to Enlarge) as soon after I arrive at this hole the water started rolling with rising fish

Then I spotted this nice fish feeding in the foam that was pushed up into the near bank.

 This fish was fun to watch and I spent most of my time on him.  It was a very nice trout, probably one of the rivers many 20 inchers.  He was feeding in a 10 foot circle that stretched from the near rock you can see out to the submerged rock you can see just beyond him in the above picture.  Several times the big fish had to chase out other trout that happened to wander into his little area.  You could tell that this fish owned this spot and had the bulk and seniority to hold it. 

The big trout rose to pluck bugs from the surface quite a bit, but spent most of it's time darting back and forth feeding subsurface on the drifting midge pupa attempting to reach the surface.

This and the next picture were in sequence.  He is rising here...

...after a subtle rise he slips back beneath the surface.

This picture shows the big fish feeding on the far right while you can see the rise ring in the upper left hand corner of another fish.  The bigger fish would protect the area stretching from the submerged rock right in front of the snow capped rock on the shore out to the submerged rock you can see just to the right of the rise ring of the smaller fish.  If that fish ever got any closer than the rise in this picture the big daddy was over there to chase it out.

Another angle of the bigger fish rising with the rise ring of the smaller fish about as close to it as the king would let it get to his area.  The rises of the big fish always were much more subtle and disturbed the water far less than his smaller competitor who seemed to always leave a very large ring on the waters surface.

So it was fun to just sit and observe today.  Now I look forward to returning with the tools to put some steel in the corner of that big fish's jaw.