The title of my last post may have been a bit misleading. It wasn’t to say that the Grand is necessarily fishing poorly at the moment, but rather that it’s been cruel to me lately. Specifically, preventing me from fishing dry flies due to murky water and of course, the evil osprey that stole my fish.

This morning I woke up early again and headed to the river for a few hours before work. I had intentions to fish the Credit, until I read a tweet by Wilson’s, mentioning that the Grand was in excellent shape. It was pretty obvious during my last outing that fishing a dry fly in such murky water was pointless. Rather than sticking to the tried and true nymph, I focused primarily on streamers and soft hackles – and while I hooked into a few fish, it wasn’t really high percentage fishing.

When all else fails on the Grand, fish a Caddis. Better yet, fish a Caddis Pupa. I should probably adopt this strategy more often. If only catching trout on dry flies wasn’t so fun, or if swinging wet flies and streamers wasn’t so easy – then I guess I would. Today though, I was out for revenge and decided to stick to the tried and true. I’ve been trying to get my wife to take up fly tying and conveniently, she recently tied a handful of a very simple caddis pattern for me: Rick’s Caddis, from this book.

The result was somewhat of an improvement over my last trip. I was catching fish all morning and the only time the action let up was when I spooked the pools by landing too many fish in them. I missed quite a few trout due to poor hook sets as I wasn’t expecting so many fish back-to-back. None were exceptionally large, but I’m not complaining – there’s no such thing as a bad trout in my book.