Winter's Spring on the Rapid Anne

In snowy NH Henry and I surveyed the abnormally warm week ahead and knew it would mean warming water and the prospect of activating mountain trout.  It turns out that they never really turned on as their biological clocks hadn't caught up to the 53 degree water and 70 degree days, but we still had a great time.

We started our adventure at Junction Pool and walked down past the ford for another 4-5 minutes to where the gradient mellowed and the steep walls flatten as the Rap flows into Graves Mill Valley.  We were early and knew the best fishing would be between 1100-1700 but couldn't help ourselves and started fishing the clear plunge pools of this lower section at 0915.

  The water was low and the sun had yet to penetrate the tight valley when we stopped to collect ourselves after an hour of little action.   We enjoyed a good sit on a rock with a plunge pool upstream while we trimmed leaders and re-rigged Henry's 7'10" 1-oz Orvis 'Ultra-fine', he'd been working a long leader and wasn't getting any line out to load the rod. As we lounged on the rock 1100 approached Hen took a seated cast at the pool at feet and after a second of drift his Mr. Rapidan Dry dipped sideways below the surface, Hen lifted his tip setting the hook in the jaw of a lovely spotted, fat 8' brookie.

With spirits raised we had great fishing for about 90-minutes until we reached the ford where it slowed. After 90-min of frustratingly slow fishing we came upon another pair of fisherman who had jumped in front of us!  I was not happy, but at least we knew why the fishing had slowed and we pushed passed them back to the jeep an Junction Pool. We jeeped up to the TU Parking lot and hopped back in the water where we fished toward net pool on the right hand side of the road.  I don't fish this section of the Rapidan frequently and was really pleased to see the lovely pools on this side.

 The trout were striking 90% of the time on droppers, a #20 beadhead prince hung on 6x was the top producer, but we kept on dries savoring those far between surface strikes.   We really had to work for our fish today, but the 17 out of the 20 trout brought to hand were in the 6-9" range, good size for high mountain brookies.  We'll be back!

Thanks for looking!

Skunked on Gunpowder Falls!

Henry and I grabbed a mid-day fishing opportunity on Wedesday and re-learned that fishing is great but not nearly as fun as fishing + catching!   With the weather and water both hovering in the early 40's we were stymied by the cold.   We had several hookups on midge droppers and I had three top water strikes during 20 minutes of surface activity and then there was ...nothing.   We did have a great time and commend Bagel Meister in Phoenix, MD as a great breakfast meeting spot, but the fish were not playing today.

Tiny Henry fishes from a rock tower