Its felt like it been a while since I traveled somewhere new. Even though it realistically hasn’t. Well this morning we were about to reset that metric. I had a tough time falling asleep the night prior and I think it was about midnight when I finally closed my eyes. Although i definitely awoke 3 or 3 times knowing my alarm was only a few hours away.
Along came 5:30am and I was up. The first thing I needed to do was load all my fishing gear up in the Explorer. As todays trip was nothing for the Fusion. I wanted to be on the road early, early enough to get up to the Northeast part of the state as the snow started to fall. It was estimated over the next 24 hours that we would be getting anywhere from 14-22 inches.
I was meeting John and Chip today and we were going to try a stretch of water none of us had been on before. The plan was to stop at the first spot and scope it out, then continue a bit farther to our destined place to fish. Well – knowing how that goes, by the time the scoping was happening we were already gearing up and just wanted to get on the water.
Although there were some car troubles that were experienced on the way. Chips Durango seemed to be pushing coolant all over the place from the overflow tube. So we decided also from that, that we should probably stop and fish here and not go any further from home.
We starting fishing from the outflow and worked our way down stream until we got to posted land. We could of walked the ridge down and got back into open water but decided since the last two hours of wading resulted in me seeing only 2 fish that I spooked we would change tactics and head up a little trib that was feeding in at this point.
The trib looked nice, beautiful water, crystal clear. Maybe the clearest water i’ve ever seen. The first 30 minutes or so was discourging as we only saw one fish. But as we got further and further up towards the headwaters we found more and more. The only problem was these fish were beyond skittish. I don’t think any of us were able to get a legitimate cast at one before it darted.
After about an hour making our way up and coming across deep pool after pool and run here and there along with spooking every fish that was present we decided to cut our losses and head back to the main stem and fish some more open water while we still had day light.
On our way back we figured wed stop at the truck to check the coolant levels now that everything cooled off. I think after that doing, in conjunction with our toes starting to get numb, our rods eyelets being all iced up we decided it would be best to call it for the day unfrotnuately. After all it was Sunday, it had been snowing for a few hours now and we didnt know how major of an issue Chips vehicle had. Even though it made it to the spot while smoking down the highway for 15 minutes, getting stranded in the cold, during a snow storm, 2hr away wouldn’t be ideal. Taking in one last look at the scenery we parted ways.
Well, if theres any good news to come out of it, im looking forward to doing some fishing again this week. After all, fishing remote snow covered forests is one f the most surreal feelings there can be. Stay tuned!