A weekend of fish, both good and bad…

We had some nice weather here in Jackson Hole this past
weekend. Naturally the best course of action was to go fishing.
Saturday, Jamie, Lulu and I headed south to fish the Snake river
canyon. This was partly to get Jamie on her first fish of the year,
but also to do some dog training. For those that don’t know, Lulu
is our 11 month old Lab pup who has an affinity for retrieving
hooked fish. While you can’t blame her, the behavior isn’t ideal
and needs to be improved in order to make her a good fishing
companion.

We immediately found fish rising to midges and small black
stoneflies. Jamie caught one spunky cutthroat trout after another
while I worked with Lulu. After a while we traded off; more fish
were caught and Lulu got better with each fish. After about two
hours we decided to quit while we were ahead (plus Lulu was
getting tired and cold). We headed back to town, picked up
supplies for cocktails and settled in on our tiny deck with friends
for the rest of the day.

Sunday I headed over to the Henry’s Fork with my neighbor
Chris. We decided to float despite our late start. The weather
seemed perfect; partly cloudy, no wind and kinda warm. As we got
the boat ready and pulled on the waders we saw a few fish rise.
There were all kinds of bugs hatching- BWOs, midges, caddis, a
few larger mayflies, what you expect from the bug factory. Right
off the bat I hooked two trout on a skwala pattern. Seemed like
we were in for a good day. WRONG! That was about as exciting as
it got as we battled our way down the river. I hooked another nice
brown on a streamer and Chris managed a few fish on a dry-
dropper combo. I ended up with more whitefish than trout and a
massive sucker that I swear was a brown trout until he got to the
net…. The highlight however came in the last bit of water when I
got a solid strike on my streamer. Brown trout, nope a PERCH!
Yeah, I caught a perch on the most famous trout river in the
world. That summed our day. Oh well, they all can’t be diamonds
right?