Hands shaking, brain racing, heart pounding. Stress? Not quite. Emergency? No. Just the first fly fishing trip of the season with my husband.
Every year we look forward to the first time we get our flies in the water. This was no exception. We decided to head up to a Nevada favorite, Wildhorse Reservoir and punish the trout on a bonsai weekend trip. We had some intel thanks to friends of ours who had been having epic days out on the water, so we had an idea where we wanted to start. Although our friends were using conventional tackle and we were fly fishing, we knew that last year the rainbows couldn’t get enough of our olive wooly buggers and TFP Olive Balanced Leeches in the morning through afternoon and purple mylar prince nymphs in the late afternoon/evening.
Hands shaking, so excited I could barely contain myself, I gave my fly Olive Balanced Leech a toss and prepared to wait. As it turned out my wait was short lived. A fish took my indicator down on the first strip! WHAM! Under it went and in my excitement I set that hook like a juice head aaand…..promptly broke my line. Wah wah.
My husband’s laughter was quickly quieted as I got back in the water and we both realized that I had the fly they wanted. I continued on my path of destruction catching about 7 nice sized fish in the span of an hour while Denis landed 1 super adorable little guy.
Then….the thing all fisherpeople dread. The lull. It came out of nowhere. One minute we couldn’t get our flies in the water fast enough, no time for talking, and the next we were having deep conversations about the feeding activity of rainbow trout and trying to catch nearby insects to discern their color.
We began switching flies, altering our strip technique, going deeper, more shallow. We even tried paying as little attention as possible since that is usually when the bite hits. Nothing seemed to be working. Then, my husband, fly fisherman extraordinaire, broke the code. He put on a Pink tag jig underneath a Jig bugger Olive and let it sit and drift. This gave him the redemption he needed and he quickly caught up to me and we ended the day with about 30 fish between us. We dragged ourselves back to the boat launch with the beautiful Nevada sunset as our view. All the while making plans for the next weekend we could escape and have another adventure.
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