Big Browns, 18 degree fishing, and huge Redfish
Well, it's been awhile since my last update. It's been a crazy winter and spring. For the past several winters I've been after a pretty large Brown trout and this winter I was finally able to land him after several missed shots, hook pulls, and line breaking over the past years. Here's a picture, I'm pretty proud of this guy.
Over Christmas we took a trip to the Norfork river and braved 18 degree weather and caught the heck out of fish. It was brutally cold, but we hung in there because of the amazing fishing. Here's my wife (Nancy) with a chunky rainbow and my son (Ren) below with a solid Brown. He was so excited, he's becoming a good fly fisherman and flytyer.
Next on my list was a trip in late April to South Louisiana for Redfish. I took the river boat the marsh and it was perfect. Gotta love the Supreme boats. I spent several hours studying the area we were going to fish and it paid off. We caught several nice fish, both tailing redfish and blind casting. Pound for pound those Redfish pull harder than any fish I've ever caught, so hard that I snapped my 9 weight Sage while fighting a 25 inch fish, I was able to land it on half a fly rod! Here's a few pics:
We discovered while in the Louisiana marsh that most of the water is actually private property. In Louisiana you can lease the marsh and it's up to the boaters to know where the private property is, they don't have to post the property. This severely impacted our ability to sight fish, I will not be going back. Laguna Madre is next on my list.
Since returning from Redfishing I have stripped my Supreme down, sanded and repainted the inside (long overdue). This has been a several week project and lots of hard work, but now the old girl looks good as new. If you can't tell I'm a huge fan of Supreme boats, I bought this boat new in 2001 and she performs as well as the day I picked it up.
I haven't fished much on the Little Red this spring. We had the great flood in Feb. and the corp had been pushing a bunch of water out of the lake through a good portion of April. But as of today the flows have slowed down and the river has been pretty much perfect. I plan on doing some fishing over the Memorial Day weekend.
Happy fishing!
Robert