Like an old friend who welcomes you back with a hearty embrace, the twists and turns, holes, glides, pools and plunges of the upper Rapidan welcomed me back to share its secrets.
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| Orvis Days |
The upper Rapidan is high gradient, skinny water, its holding water protected by a web of deadfall, boulders and new growth branches which demand constant attention to any backcast as they protect these colorful brookies.
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| Ready to head out |
The flow today was moderately high and cold at 44 degrees and as the air temperature never beat 50, our hopes of finding an early season epeorus hatch never materialized and almost all our strikes today were subsurface on nymphs and streamers.
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| Fat Brookie from Bryan |
Bryan and I had begun our day linking up on 28 West of Manassas and catching-up on life as we made the familiar trip to towards Culpepper and up the increasingly rough Rapidan access road.
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| Glide Pool in its green glory |
We checked out the Junction pool where the water was abit higher than ideal but having read some reports of hatches in the headwaters of SNP streams we headed up to the boundary gate to fish my favorite stretch of the river towards the Brown House. Bryan was baptizing a beautiful new 6'6" 3wt pocket water stick from LL Bean and I walked down the familiar trail with an Orvis 6' 2wt hoping that its short length would be perfect for the tight conditions.
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| At the center of the web |
We leap-frog fished and I think that we both caught a brookie in the first pool or two we fished. Bryan's was a colorful 7-8 incher and mine was a fingerling! I began the day working a size 16 beadhead pheasant tail nymph under and adams parachute and throughout the day stayed with the pheasant tail but also tried a Mr. Rapidan, yellow humpy and elf hair caddis to little reward.
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| Bryan with Brookie |
Bryan ended up having the most success on size 8 bucktail streamers! While I was going small he was going large and surprising (at least to me) he did very well plumbing the depth of pools and swinging the streamer through the riffles. We ended the day with bout two dozen brookies brought to hand.
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| Bryan at Scott's favorite Log pool..Bryan hooked a nice trout in the upper pool |
We caught about the the same number of fish but fish for fish hie technique produced larger trout. A few times ma weather started spitting on us but never really opened up and then occasionally got sunny and breezy.
The temp never got above 50 and I suspect that we missed the hatch by one day as it's forecast to reach 70 tomorrow. We fished for 4 hours and covered about 2/3 of the way to the Brown House.
True to Scott's teaching, I caught my best brookie, made that my last cast and climbed out of the river happy to be back on the water with a good friend and looking forward to doing it again.. Given the conditions we found I think that next week may begin a great stretch.
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