Well folks, the end is near...on midnight of September 30th, four of my five favorite local trout fishing spots will be closed for the next seven months, including this one. So, hitting them hard while I still can, and fish are still biting! Though, the evening yielded only one trout, but a nice one! In addition to the two keeper perch (or are they smallmouth bass?? ;oD), I caught an annoying amount of little guys too small to eat...wondering if I should bring my minnow bucket along, and either throw the little ones into the stream below the dam (have fun competing with the brookies in that small cold stream environment guys!) or transplant them to Clark's Marsh, where they can compete with the bass and pumpkinseed...either way I want them outta there, too much competition for these beautiful brookies! The two I brought home (currently being frozen stiff) both had egg sacs in their bellies, so I took a couple of fertile females out of the population. The 12-incher put quite a bend in my rod, and I wasn't entirely disappointed to see it was that big of a perch...
WARNING to Spence: don't show these to your better half, or she might want to start fishing with me instead... ;oD
All fish except one perch took the mottled brown/grizzly #10 Woolly Bugger with black bead-chain eyes. This very same fly pattern worked well during my parents' visit back in May, accounting for nine keeper perch, a pile of little ones, and two nice (11-12") brookies (pics posted on here back then). This pattern has always done well here early in the season, and now perhaps later as well. Surface feeding was sparse and scattered, no response to either a #10 modified Joe's Hopper or a #12 White Wulff...no bugs visible except for a few sparse midges and they weren't bringing anything up but dinkers.
Hey, no one else is posting photos on here lately besides Spence and Jason (and a few odd bugs by Kurt), so somebody has to show that they're having some fishing success...
Jonathon
No matter how big the one you just caught is, there's always a bigger one out there somewhere...