Rocky Ford Creek Report: Bad Trip

I made the decision on Monday to head for Rocky Ford Creek instead of the Methow River. I thought there was a much better chance of actually catching a fish there. But there wasn't.

In fact the whole trip kind of sucked.

I've thought about this. Seems like every fishing trip I read about online is awesome. I don't know about you, but that's not my reality. Sure, I buy into the bumper sticker philosophy that "a bad day fishing is better than a good day working." But the fact is, there are some bad days. And sometimes what makes them bad isn't that you didn't catch anything, but that the day just kind of overall sucked.

It has been said that to say everybody is special is another way of saying that nobody is. Same with fishing trips. So, compared to the really special trips I've been on, this one, well, kind of sucked.

It was one more day that wasn't wintry but still wasn't quite spring-like; that wasn't cold but still had a chilly edge to it; that wasn't dark but was drab, with a washed out light filtering through the high overcast; that wasn't windy, but that had a variable and gusty breeze that kept messing with your cast. And it was a day that had the first mosquitoes of the year.

It wasn't crowded, but there was just this one guy who came out of nowhere through the cattails and moved into my space. I had wandered a few yards down the bank, so he came in and set up right next to my jacket and bag. It would have been OK if he had just said something like, "Oh, excuse me, are you fishing here?" But he ignored me. He even kept his back to me when I walked over later to pick up my stuff. Jerk.

I was fishing dries. Little dries, big dries. I got lots of hits. Slow hits, business-like hits, explosive hits. But not a single hookup. It was like they were ghost trout, the hook going right through their ghostly lips. What the heck?

So then the guy, who is fishing an indicator rig, catches a fish. And then another. Now, I might have tried an indicator myself at some point. I usually do. But I sure wasn't going to after that. No, I dug in with my dries. Dry or Die.

But it still irritated me that I couldn't fish with an indicator now because of him. Each time he was reeling in his fish, this pelican came paddling over to see if he could get in on the action. I've heard of pelicans taking trout right off the line. I was really hoping I'd get to see it in person.

Yeah, by then I was in a pretty bad mood. And yes, I'm pretty sure a bad mood can turn any day into a bad day. But sometimes you've just got to go with it.

So I fished a muddler to close out the day. It's my favorite way to fish, and in past trips it has paid off, especially after the light goes down. I enjoyed it, in an angry, aggressive kind of way. I even became optimistic. But the fish didn't turn on this time, and at twilight I packed up and headed for home. Fishless.

I had to wonder if it was because I had tied up a special fly the night before just for this trip, and then forgot it, leaving it sitting uselessly on my desk at home.

It wasn't a terrible trip, but it didn't satisfy. I saw this pelican's mate show up downstream once. She perched on a mid-stream rock. He swam over and immediately tried to mount her. She was having none of it, and sent him packing.

That's kind of what the day felt like.