Dan and I finally had another chance to trout fish one of our favorite spots together on Good Friday. The weather was cold and rainy for this time of year, with the air temperature hovering in the mid forties throughout the day. The rain was on and off, with periods of heavy rain. The water was up a couple of feet above normal. All of this was OK with me, except that this was the first time (even including the days on which forest fires have occured in the past) that Dan didn't preface our trip by saying it was a perfect day to go trout fishing. That ominous anomaly notwithstanding, we bravely began our trip the typical way.
I picked up Dan around 5:30 a.m., inadvertantly blowing my car's horn in the process of loading the car with our gear. Then, it's Bo time, and we're off to Bojangle's, for our obligatory morning dose of grease. How else are you going to survive a long day of fishing?
We started fishing around 8:00, and it was slow. And cold. And wet. For the first half mile or so, we caught no fish, though Dan had a few hits on spinners and lures. Finally, they started biting, and we landed around 12-15 brown trout, rainbow trout, smallmouth bass, and one Dan (more on this below) on spinners and lures. Most were in the 10-14 inch range. The water temperature was in the low 50's all day.
The most exciting event of the day goes to Dan and his misfire during a cast, in which he deeply sank two hooks into his hand. He waited to hook himrself until we were near the furthest portion of the backcountry, probably a couple miles from civilization. Then, while deciding not to film the episode and try to make a viral video out of the incident, I proceeded to watch dan basically rip the hooks out of his hand (which was numb, fortunately, due to the cold, rainy weather), and finish the day fishing. I'll refer Dan to our class on hook removal, for future reference. After hooking himself, I saw this Minnesota native shiver for the first time ever on a fishing trip. (We routinely fish in the winter with sub-freezing temperatures.) We heated up around a campfire, using the only semi-dry wood we could find, under a rock outcrop. The rest of the day wasn't too bad. See the narrated video below for more on our day, including video of many of the trout and smallmouth bass we caught.