Oak Orchard - Year 4

Tuesday night after work, I met up with Steve "The Mailman" Nelson, for our annual midnight drive up to Oak Orchard for the tournament. We arrived just after midnight; we didn't waste much time setting the tone for the trip. Drinking until about two am, we hit the hay for a brief nap, until the four am alarm went off. It was five days of awesome fishing, not too many brown in the system, but the steelhead, and kings were there and ready to eat. One of the reasons I do this tournament, is the food, it is so good and there is no shortage of it. Each day we get breakfast, lunch, and dinner, everything is home cooked right there on the river, so I guess "riverside" cooked is more like it. Stoneflies were, again, my fly of choice for the whole tournament, hot bead head prince nymphs, and small eggs were also working well. One fly that I would have never thought to fish, the San Juan Worn, was cleaning up for one of the guys in our group. Anyway I could type for hours about the trip, but I'm going to let the pictures tell the story.

Early Morning Production

New York Weekend Tour



Trout Bum New York Tour

This past weekend Joe and I added one more bumming moment to the books. We decided to head north to float the West Branch of the Delaware on Sunday; then drive up to our Altmar Steelhead camp for a day on the river chasing Kings, Steelhead, and maybe a Brown.

Reading the reports and checking the water levels all week we both knew what we were in for on the D, muddy high water. This meant no more 5wts with 6x tippet, it was time to bring out the 6wts with sinking lines and over sized streamers. Needless to say it was tough fishing; after pounding the banks all day we managed to move a few fish with 2 very nice browns to the boat.

After floating all day we had the boat on the trailer and were headed further north yet. We woke up a little late but still managed to find a few nice stretches of river to work. It wasn't long before Joe had is first fresh king to the net, I managed to hook a couple early but nothing to the net. After all day fishing we managed a few really nice Kings and one honking Brown.

We took the video camera and tripod along, so look for a new edit in the next couple day!!!

Hot Patterns: Sucker Spawn (all colors), Thumpin Jack Flash Stone (Fl. Chart.) Nuke Egg (all colors)