Time: 10:00AM – 2:00PM
Location: Between Almont and Five Mile Bridge just above private homes
Fish Landed: 7 brown trout
Taylor River 08/06/2010 Photo Album
On Friday I planned to test the waters further down the canyon near Almont. The valley down low widens a bit and consequently the river has wide areas that might allow a crossing. I was down river three or four miles from the location Jeff Shafer and I fished during August 2009. I parked in a pullout just before a fenced off private area with several residences. I made sure I was out of the circle used by cars pulling trailers for picking up rafts. I geared up and entered the water just below a small island and fished the nice deep run between the island and the bank by the road. I began with the double I still had on from the previous evening, but this wasn’t drawing any attention, so pretty quickly went back to the Chernobyl ant and trailing BHHE.
Hindrances to Fishing
I crossed the river next to the island and began methodically prospecting all the likely holding locations along the north bank. As I did this, quite a bit of river traffic cruised by…rafts, duckies, and a canoe. For the most part, they were in the center of the river, and I was tight to the bank, so I don’t think there was much impact. I began catching small browns on the BHHE on a fairly regular basis, but I was covering a lot of water and making many casts. At one point in a nice deep area of slower moving water between a deep run and the bank, I spotted a nice size fish emerge from the depths and sip the Chernobyl. I set the hook and felt the weight of decent fish. The hook set turned the brown so I could see it, and it was quite long, perhaps near the 20 inch range. But the hook set only held for a second or two, and the fish was off. Needless to say, after a day and a half of catching small browns, I was quite disappointed to lose this beauty.
More Traffic
At a location not too far from the close encounter with a monster, I spotted some monofilament line dangling from a tree limb. I reached over and discovered a small mouse fly attached to the line. As I unwound the line to recover the mouse fly, much to my surprise I discovered a second huge articulated streamer made from soft marabou fiber. I clipped off both flies and stuffed them in one of my boxes. The owner of these flies wasn’t messing around, fishing two flies that were bigger than most of the fish I was catching in a tandem rig!
One of Two Flies Found on a Branch on Taylor
Second Fly - A Mouse
I continued working my way upstream in this manner eventually landing seven small brown trout. I landed quite a few dinkers too small to count as well. At 2PM I needed to make a decision. I could continue fishing the north bank the remainder of the afternoon and hope that some clouds rolled in to create some insect activity. Or I could retreat back to the car and explore Spring Creek. I chose the second option.
Wild Huckleberries?
When I returned to the parking lot, a fisherman was casting to the run where I’d begun. A woman was sitting in a folding chair in the parking lot next to a car reading a book. This was the fisherman’s wife, and she was reading and waiting for him. They were from Kansas, and she informed me that her husband had not done well on this trip so far. In fact, she told me he failed to catch fish on Spring Creek. With this revelation, I headed to Spring Creek.