Angling

My wife didn’t know I liked to fish till we moved to Utah. In our previous seventeen years of marriage I never went fishing. When she asked why now, I told her because we hadn’t lived near mountain streams earlier. I grew up angling in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska. Fishing and mountains were like bread and butter; I didn’t do one without the other.

About three years ago my wife signed me up for this course where I learned to “nymph”, a technique of fly fishing using “flies” that simulate nymphs and other water insects. These nymphs bounce along the bottom of streams and into the mouths of waiting trout lying on the stream bed. When a trout mouths a fly-fishing nymph, it detects it isn’t edible and turns its head to allow the current to wash it away. The trick is to be able to detect the moment when a trout mouths a nymph and set the hook. Sometimes the line hesitates, but mainly you start to develop a sixth sense. I’ve never had more success fishing so it is about the only type of angling I do.

Today being Veterans Day, I was able to get an hour and a half of fishing on the Weber River. I caught one brown trout on a sow bug and two browns and a white fish using a bead head pheasant tail pattern.

Originally posted in UNCoRRELATED Nov 12, 2007