Sometimes, the best things in fishing aren’t the trips you spend a year planning, or the trophy trout you hauled in after getting skunked for a week. They’re the things you stumble on when you least expect it, and if that happens on your home water, that’s even better. For most of us, our home water is often an overlooked trout stream, a place that’s nice to have close to the house, but not somewhere most folks would plan a trip around.
That’s what makes it perfect for home water – it’s usually never crowded. The fish aren’t huge, but they’re not fingerlings, either. And if you’ve been around long enough, you probably have a good handle on when and where the best fishing is. You’d be forgiven for thinking you had your home creek all figured out.
I felt that exactly about this time last year, when I went off to my home water for a day of fishing with my mother-in-law. I’d promised her a float trip on a nearby tailwater, but a rainstorm and extra releases from the dam had the river running more like chocolate milk. I called an audible, and we went up the creek instead, where we spent the first few hours catching more small rainbows than my mother-in-law knew what to do with.
My mother-in-law wanted to try for slightly larger trout, so we went downstream to a section where the browns usually top out around 15 inches. Another perk of home water like this is knowing it well enough that you can tailor a day of fishing depending on your mood, or your mother-in-law’s wants.
We parked, walked to the river, and the fish were rising. Consistently. There’s not usually much of that on this river until summer, when the stoneflies and caddis are abundant. In April, the only hatch I’d ever seen before was a handful of midges. But these fish were going nuts on giant brown mayflies.
I’m not much of an entomologist, so I wasn’t sure exactly what these flies were. But a size 12 Adams matched them close enough, and the fish didn’t seem to care about the color discrepancy, either. We fished until close to sunset, when a few bats started swooping through the low light for an early dinner of spent mayflies.
Once I got home, I did some digging and realized the mayflies we saw were March Browns, and for some reason, I hadn’t stumbled onto the hatch in the three years I’ve been living and fishing here. I went back to that same stretch of river a few more times, and the mayflies and trout were there, hatching and rising like clockwork. Then I had to leave town for work, my daughter was born early, and the rest of whatever March Brown season there was passed me by.
So, when the calendar turned to April this year, I made a note to head up to the creek earlier than normal to see if I could find the bugs. With the warm winter, I thought the hatch might come off a bit earlier than normal, and in a rare moment, it turns out I was right. Last Tuesday, with a bright sun overhead and almost no wind, I pulled up in the early afternoon to see swarms of March Browns over the river’s surface.
The fish didn’t want to rise for them in the still, slow water, but were more than happy to eat big flies off the top in the runs and riffles. For the next four hours, the fishing was some of the best I’ve ever had on the local creek. The fish rose happily, I caught one or two from each run, and they were mostly larger than average.
As I walked back to my truck, the March Browns were still in clusters over the river. A few mated pairs swirled above the river’s surface, and the fish were still rising. There was more fishing to be had, but it was almost dinnertime and I wanted to go home and play with my daughter before bed.
So I went back the next day, and in one of the rarer moments in fly fishing, it was almost as good as the first time.