Trout Lake Report: Saving the Day

You have a blog, and you think sometimes that maybe your faithful readers get tired of Trout Lake. But there's nowhere you'd rather be as summer hits its peak. You want to be a part of every day as the season unwinds moment by moment. You want to soak these hot days on the water deep into your bones for the long winter ahead.

On this day the lake and the sky embrace.

Damsels seem to dance in the sky.

You've tied up some new damsel imitations, but you don't find any fish rising more than once, and none willing to surprise you with a random take. You work your way around the south end to the channel leading to "The Nursery," a pond from which, in the few times you've tried it, you've caught only baby trout. Nothing's happening in the big lake. Might be time to check it out again.

You see only little flippy rises, but you cast to a few. As you're heading back into the channel a fish grabs the trailing damsel imitation. A baby, but a Brown through and through.

Back in the big lake the surface is a mirror unbroken by a single rise.

The lake stays quiet. A plane crosses overhead, and, as always, you feel grateful to be down here and not up there.

You drift and kick along the shoreline. You kick out to deep water. The rises are few and far between. You enjoy the peace and quiet, but you miss the trout. You begin to think that little Brown will be the fish that saved the day.

Then, at near dark, far down the lake from the truck, you hear a splashy rise along the willows. You hear it again in the same area. And again. You kick over where you can mark the location of the ripples. You clip off the damsel and tie on a muddler by silhouetting fly and tippet against the afterglow. Then you kick in toward the willows. It takes three casts and there's a splashy rise right where you last saw the dim wake of the stripped muddler. You pick up and you have him.

You loved the little Brown, but this Rainbow saved the day.