Welcome to The Bonefish Flat

There's a stiff wind in your face as you squint in the sun trying to see what the guide sees. "Bonefish at 12 o'clock about 90 feet, do you see it, mon?" You don't and keep squinting, your hat pulled low to keep the sun out of your eyes. "Bonefish at 11 o'clock 70 feet out. Come on man, do you see it?" As the guide is calmly shifting the skiff into position, this time you spot the fish, "I got, it," you reply.

"OK, Mon, Bonefish 50 feet at 10 o'clock. Cast when you're ready."

Cast when you're ready. And with that you drop your fly, roll out a cast, false cast once, and then...

Welcome to the bonefish flat.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Thanksgiving Success on the Gunpowder River

It's taken me a while to get around to posting from last week, but I had two great days out on the water.  And no, I wasn't on the flats, but on the trout streams.  I fished the famous Gunpowder River near Baltimore, Maryland.  The Gunpowder is famous for NOT being kind to me.  I was about ready to give up on it but the wife let me go up there on Thanksgiving morning before having dinner with some family.

I finally had some success.

A respectable Brown from the Gunpowder.  

On Saturday, I had a chance to go out again on the South River which is in Greene County, Virginia, near my home town of Culpeper.  This is a stocked trout stream that is a "put and take."  I have had crap all luck with stocked streams, but for some reason I keep putting myself through the torture of trying to catch a trout on one of these streams.  My luck on the South would prove no better this go around.  Even though the stream had just been stocked four days before, I didn't see, or spook, a single trout.  

I emailed one of my good friends, Tom Sadler who writes the blog Dispatches from the Middle River, and is an all around great fisherman, to get his take on trout streams.  He made me feel a lot better confirming my thought that the "locals" tend to fish out and harvest the majority of these trout as soon as they leave the truck.  Next time, maybe I'll just go for a hike instead.  

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