Team Scandinavian Scores Gold!

Last night I got a call from my buddy, Canadian-Ben (SWE) to see if I wanted to go fishing Sunday in spite of all the bad reports about how the rivers were blown out by mid-week.  He was watching the flow plummet back to normal and the weather forecast was optimistic.  I was easily swayed since I had my heart set on fishing this weekend since being skunked last Monday.  We set a time to meet at his place for breakfast, and spent the next 20 minutes getting my stuff together for the trip.

The alarm went off at 6am this morning, I was out the door by 6:30am.  I got to Ben's place, it was still dark thanks to the daylight savings time switchover, and he made a great breakfast.  We headed out and found our way to the riverside by 8:30am.

The fog had lifted, the sky was overcast, and the water was very cold.  We headed to a favorite spot of Ben's and to assure me that there were trout here, he caught and landed a nice buttery Brown trout to show me.  That was very kind of him, but now Team Sweden was ahead of Team Norway in the medal count thanks to a size 20 brassie.  The water was near its previous flow from a week ago and was somewhat stained, but it had gradually got better as the day progressed.  We fished awhile until we thought we pretty much checked out all the possible feeding lanes, then headed back to the car to move on to other possibilities in warmer water.

Along the way, we stopped in at Lund's so that I could check out the fabled Hardware store that had fly fishing stuff that I had heard about over the years.  That was interesting, they definitely had a large fly assortment.  It was still kind of weird to go into a hardware store and see Filson clothes, Fish Pond fly vests, echo rods, and Dr. Slick tools.  I did my obligatory purchase of some flies, as I try to do at all "normal" fly shops that I have visited and we continued on our way to fish some more.

A short walk later we were back in the water, and it wasn't long before Team Norway (that's me) evened up the Medal count with a respectable Brown trout on one of my double secret zebra midge variations, in a size 22.  We made a few more casts and then decided to leap-frog the guys below.  There was a light, but steady hatch all day of little black stone flies as shown in the picture above, running about size 12 to 8 and the fish were not taking them on the surface.

We hit here and there and eventually ran into, Team Sunshine.  Team Sunshine comprised Sid, Joe, and Tom from our fly tiers club.  When we came up to them, Sid and Joe were relaxing and enjoying all 68 degrees of sunshine and a cigar, with Tom just down around the bend.  For those wanting to know, Team Sunshine had no medals earned at this point.  We chatted a bit and continued on our trek.  The air temperature had risen quickly, and all the clouds had left for the day.   It was a nice day, and that sentiment was echoed by the other dozen or so fly fisherman that we came across who all had been unsuccessful.  I have to suspect that it was because a lot of them were just getting on the water when the sun had come out instead of fishing the "better" overcast weather earlier in the day.

So, Team Norway and Team Sweden decided to form alliances to ramp up our medal count and we formed Team Scandinavian.  Which just really meant that we had enjoyed our time out on the water, and that the we needed to hold a celebratory feast at a nearby respectable Wisconsin beer burger joint Ben knew of.  We spent a good 6 hours in the cold water, and we had "earned" it.  It was nice way to wrap up a day where we had both got our first trout of the 2010 season on what was a to be considered a tough day of fishing as far as the trout not cooperating.  For the record, the leinie's honey weiss tap beer and Spotted Cows on tap waffle fries were very good.