Parking ticket flies and trading trout.
On a Saturday afternoon, I went down to the Boise River here in town to do a little streamer fishing. I parked in a pretty popular parking lot in Eagle Idaho and walked a little way downriver, working water as I went. A few hours later when I got back to my car, there was a little slip of paper under my windshield wiper. My first thought was “shit, I got a parking ticket” but it didn’t look like a ticket, it was too small. It was a hand-written note that said “hello fellow angler, these flies are what did it for me on the Owyhee today, tight lines!” On top of the note, there was a cream-colored zonker, a yellow humpy, and a small green Moorish hopper.
I was already planning to fish the Owyhee the following day, so this was like a sign from above that it was going to be a good day. I hadn’t been there in a couple of months because I’d been busy rod building. A few people had told me that that the fishing has been insane lately, and that’s exactly how it turned out to be. Even better, when I arrived I was able to find a parking spot where I wanted to fish, which is it auspicious start to the day on the O! I hiked down to the water with my bamboo five weight and my streamer rod and saw the willows were thick with caddis and yellow sally stoneflies. Pretty much every time a sally was skittering across the surface it would get slashed at by a hungry trout. I didn’t have much confidence in the hopper this early in the year, but for the sake of trying the flies, I was given that’s what I started with. In the first 10 minutes, it got eaten 5 times before I, unfortunately, lost it in a tree. My Mustang Sally did some serious work after that and for the rest of the day. I had the best hook-up rates fishing downstream and feeding line out to put the fly over a fish.
After lunch, I tied on a purple Hippie Stomper (a foam beetle attractor fly) with a caddis pupa dropped off the bend. I worked this new rig near some structure and when it passed over some submerged wood that dry fly got smoked by a massive brown. I played the fish and got it to my feet. The water was clear enough that I could see its black and red spots clearly and it was definitely, 100% certainly, positively a Brown Trout. I was reaching with my net when It took one last run and bull-dogged back upstream into deeper water. I took a few steps over some big rocks to get in a better place to fight the fish from and the line went momentarily slack, but then the pull from the fish seemed to double. I thought that somehow the dropper had snagged the fish in the tail and the dry had popped out of its mouth, but when I saw a much larger fish jump a couple of seconds later, I knew that wasn’t the case. When that brown swam through the deeper water, the trailing caddis pupa must have looked real tasty to a rainbow that was holding there! The rainbow measures 25 inches and the brown was probably 18 or 19 so either one of them would have been a great fish but hooking them both on the same cast was a first for me! The situation was so unbelievable and comical that I had to write about it! I swear that every word of this is true and this isn’t just another fish-story.