February Browns … yes, that’s plural

“Fortune favors the lucky”. 

I’m a firm believer in this maxim, and it bore out today. Two fortunate casts, to the right spot, at the right moment, led to momentary angling euphoria.

The daytime temperature reached nearly 60 degrees today in Pittsburg, and the high sun made it feel a bit warmer than that at times. However, the river is still mighty cold – 36.5 degrees, as I found out stumbling across the river. I went down, for the briefest of moments, but trudged on with the dogged determination of the Old Man in that book by Hemingway.

Nik Patalano and I explored some new water for Nik, and had a great time enjoying the sun and casting to great looking water. But, you know how this story goes … many casts in to what looks like great wintertime holding water for trout, but success? It’s literally feast or famine at this time of year, and it’s been all famine for me so far in 2017.

Therefore we weren’t surprised not touching much at first. Nik had a bump in one fishy looking spot and then had another trout come out from under a log to follow his offering, but no hook ups for either of us.

Finally, Fortuna smiled upon me as a hen brown trout with some shoulders on her greedily took my dead drifted Gray Soft Hackle Streamer. Luckily, Nik had his landing net on him and ran downstream to net the fish and we bid her farewell and long life.

Just a few minutes later, an even larger hen brown took the same offering, in what looked to be a very shallow lie (maybe two feet in depth?). Nik was on the run again to help me net it, and she was off on her way like a shot after a few pictures.

The strategy at this time of year is to simply cover as much of the river as possible with your casts and drifts. Fish all of the water you can, whether it looks “fishy” or not – we can never quite be sure of where they are waiting for their next meal to come to them, so hit as much of it as you can. Maybe you’ll be lucky too.