I had a day off today so Mike and I headed down south to fish a mountain stream. We were very optimistic and hopeful to get a bunch of nice fish on dries today. The point of today was definitely dry fly fishing. We had to work for them today though. The day started with us casting stone flies and single dries or even two dries. I had one really nice fish, a rainbow well over 20 inches come up and eat my stone fly that I missed. It was a long cast and I had too much slack and just fisherman error, I missed that fish. The dry fly takes were few and far between. I had one other eat on a caddis that I missed, I farmed that one too and missed it. The fish were not overly eager to come up to the surface. It was hot, nice blue skies and the fish just didn't want to come up to the surface. Soon as we put droppers on and started fishing droppers underneath the dries we started picking up fish. We actually picked up a lot of fish in the afternoon but all of those fish came on the droppers. We were reluctant to do that and kept trying to fish the dry but the dry fly fishing just wasn't happening. I was reluctant to fish droppers just cause I really wanted to get fish on the surface however as soon as we started fishing droppers the fishing really picked up. All the fish we caught were real quality fish. Mike got a bunch of nice rainbows, I got a bunch of nice rainbows and all the rainbows were just kind of carbon copies in that 18 to 21 inch range, all nice and healthy, all very strong and fought exceptionally well. The fishing was good if you fished the right things, the fish just didn't want to eat on the surface today. Unfortunately it was so hot there just weren't a lot of bugs hatching. We had to take off cause I had to get back to Calgary cause I had trips in the morning and couldn't stay late to fish the evening hatch, but it was a good day fishing, nice to get out, nice to get a bunch of fish that fight that hard. It's always nice to fish different water when you get a chance to.
