Howdy,

I stepped out of my comfort zone yesterday and did something different.  I went fishing for the fun of it.  You see, I’ve put a lot of time and effort into building a couple businesses – an online fly shop and a guide service.  I’m not looking for sympathy here, after all, it’s hard to feel sorry for a guy whose job (one of them anyway) involves spending long hours on beautiful rivers casting a fly rod.  I love most every aspect of what I do.  There are pluses and minuses to most any job.  Tying flies and guiding trips are definitely jobs that are heavily weighted with pluses.

Fishing is always fun – even when you get skunked, rained on, frozen, sun baked, bug bit, etc.  What I meant by going fishing for the fun of it was that I went without the intention of building my business.  I wasn’t out there to test fly patterns.  I wasn’t there to scout a new section of water.  I simply loaded up the family and headed for a small lake in the mountains. 

Lori strapped Hadlee in the pack and spent the afternoon taking pictures.  The boys and I hit the lake and fished.

A Cascade Mtn. lake - dozens like it around this area

the Boys on the makeshift raft

looking for cruisers

very intense Mayfly hatch

Enough of the “snapshots”.  Here’s some of Lori’s great camera work:

a caterpillar pretending to be a flower stem

Mountain flowers

another Mountain flower

Check out these Dragonflies!

a bright red dragonfly

these boys are HUGE

Oh yeah, I caught a fish.  At the height of the mayfly hatch (pictured near the top of the post) nearly 2/3 of the lake was covered in March Brown spinners.  Only saw one fish rise for a meal.  A few fish rose as the hatch dissipated, maybe picking up dead spinners.  I fished Kaufmann’s Timberline Emerger for a while without any success.  I switched to a brown wooley bugger for a bit and had no luck either.  Finally I tied on a orangish/red wooley bugger and found a taker.  A very fat 15″ rainbow that didn’t put up much of a fuss.  I saw several larger fish cruising around, but spooked them with my casts.  This fish was holding in the deepest part of the lake and took the fly near the bottom on a slow retrieve.

a fat Cascade Mtn. Rainbow

Slow down and give them roses a sniff once in a while……………….

Dave