The main river out here has gotten mighty slushy as of recent, but that isn’t gonna stop us from finding good water to fish for my birthday. So I call the local spring creek and ask if they’d give me and my broke fishing bum friends a discounted rod fee. They laughed when I said we couldn’t afford the forty dollar fee and let us come fishing. Good people over there.
Ahh, Depuys. Where good fisherman get their ass handed to them and newbies always seem to get lucky. The creek is cold and quiet this morning. A thin layer of fog rises from the spring fed water, ducks splashing, and the deer were peeking out of the brush at us as we put our rods together. Sometimes when you are at Depuy’s it looks like you’re in a Disney movie where all the small woodland creatures are singing and frolicking around the property – lucky for them Brewer can’t hunt here…
The team quickly fills up Eva’s hut parking lot just to claim our territory for the day – one of the most crucial parts of fishing the spring creeks. Eva’s Hut is without a doubt, famous on the Depuy’s property. If you get to the creek first, this is where you go. I hurry to get the fire started in the smoking hut and it’s time to fish.
Brewer loves to second guess my fly selection. And even though I never listen to him, most of the time he is right. A fellow shop employee who loves to “tight line” and fish “by the book”, Brewer is one of the most knowledgeable fisherman I know, I just can’t tell him that. He starts, “Thing is with that bright pink worm in this slow clear water, a fish can see it from anywhere, and you should get a strike on the first few drifts.” But before he could tell me to switch flies, bobber down- fish on. I’ll be damned, he was right, a nice feisty birthday rainbow on the first few drifts of the day. Good work today buddy.
Other than that, the fishing was pretty tough – working hard for a couple small trout. There was a Baetis hatch around noon, and some more undersized rainbows were taken on dries and nymphs.
The more time I spend on the spring creeks, the more I realize how much a “good day” really comes from luck. It’s amazing how such a small and pristine creek, filled with trophy trout, can feel so empty and vacant at one moment then change to a creek boiling with feeding fish the next. It’s really all about the bugs and weather. And today we had bright blue skies, which the bugs didn’t seem to prefer.
As the day ended, Brewer and I decide to change our tactics for the last remaining light we have. We start hole hopping in the truck and fished a streamer in some of the culverts and deeper pools in the creek. I manage one more trout – this time a bigger brown trout- that ate a black bugger stripped right through the plunge pools beneath the pond.
It’s always hard to leave water when it looks as good as Depuy’s Spring Creek, specially with the thought that I could be so close to my Tyrannosaurus Trout. But the temperature is dropping faster than the sun, and we should probably call it a day. So I did not catch my big fish, but I did get to spend my birthday on the water with great friends and that’s all a man can ask for.
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