Miles Driven: 288
Gas: $15
It has been over two weeks since I got back from filming at Pesca Maya Lodge in Ascension Bay Mexico, so this past weekend I decided to wash off the salt and sand, and hit the cold tailwaters of the Lower Yuba River for a day.
It was Sunday morning and the first official day of daylight savings to spring our clocks forward an hour. I tell ya, losing an hour when your alarm is scheduled to go off at 5:30 am hurts. If it was anything but fishing, I probably would have flaked out. After getting past the much needed two snoozes taps, I was up and ready to hit the road with two buddies from work.
We pulled in to an empty parking lot on the Yuba just below the hwy 20 bridge that crossed overhead at around 9:30 am. The water was looking pretty off color and the forecast was calling for rain in the afternoon. With the water flows running a little high, we weren't feeling too confident-- but hell we had already driven 2.5 hrs to get there and we didn't have a plan B, so we suited up and rigged up the heaviest junk we had.
There's a spot on the river that is kind of like my honey hole and I planned to fish it most of the day before I even left San Francisco. BUT-- I told myself that theirs lots of water between there and the parking lot, so I figured I'd speed fish my way over there. This was my big mistake because not only did I not catch fish, but I saw someone scaling the cliff I planned to climb to get to my hole. I could have almost sworn that no one else knew about fishing that spot because you have to grow a par to get their. Apparently I'm not the only dumb fisherman to risk it all for some trout.
Hoping the other fisherman would walk past my spot I had decided to follow him, at a good distance, up and over the rocky mountain side. At the highest point of the ridge I eventually caught up to him and said hello. My initial frustration with him soon left as we carried on a conversation about fishing the Yuba and other local spots in CA. After about 15 minutes of friendly talk, he brought out his digital camera to show me some of the fish he had caught. Things got pretty weird fast when the fishing portion of his memory card ended. Kinky stuff--Stuff I'm really not sure what I was looking at--Stuff I don't want to see alone on top of a 100ft cliff looking over a fast deep river. Fortunately he felt awkward too, so he turned it off and put it away. Usually this would have been my time to exit, but he had the right of way to push ahead since he was first to the top. To my luck, he proceeded to gaze off into the distance. Awkward silence was upon us.
Impatient and very weirded out, one of my buddy's Casey caught up to us just in the nick of time. We offered him the "you go ahead and I'll find another spot to fish" idea, but to our amazement he told us to go ahead and that he was going to head back down. We said our goodbyes and we were off
We scaled down the other side of the cliff to my sacred honey hole where the fish were stacked. Most of the fish we caught that day were super bright, full of fight, and very grabby. They would almost glow against the contrasting rocks in the shallow water when we landed them.
At around 1:30/2:00 air warmed up and the sun broke through for about 10 minutes. Almost instantaneously the air started to flutter with March Browns, Blue Wing Olives, and Skwala Stones. The fish and birds started to feed aggressively on emergers and adults. As I re-rigged to possibly get one of these fish on a dry, Casey managed to hook and land an almost perfectly beautiful resident rainbow on his trusted Sex Dungeon sculpin patter. Strangly the fish was missing part of its jaw, probably a defect from miss handling from another angler years ago. It also had a orange tip dorsal fin neither of us had ever seen before.
The rain picked up and the fish stopped biting, so we headed back to the car early and made the long trek back to the city.
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