NEW FEATURE!

So I feel like my blog is getting a little flat and now that Holy Week and Easter are over I am going to get Sarah to help me do some changes to my blog.  Nothing major but something to freshen it up a little and maybe weed out some of what is not working.

Speaking of weeding the first change is going to be easy and it is already started.  I have started a garden here at the new house and Sarah and I will both be writing about it from time to time.  She has put two posts up and there is mention of the garden in both of them. 

I want to give a little insight as to why a garden and why I am going to name it Aunt Verna's New England Garden.  My fathers aunt Verna is like a grandma to me and my siblings.  She lives in PA and has lived in the same house for as long as I can remember and at this house she has a garden.  Verna's garden is a large vegetable garden and it is always full of goodies.  The garden is amazing and so is she.  A woman in her late 80's who plants a lager garden and meticulously tends it daily.  So needless to say I have eaten lots of veggies from her garden and hope my own garden can emulate hers.

My garden is named Aunt Verna's New England Garden because I want this garden to be an extension of my aunt Verna's garden here in New England.  I am hoping that with her name attached to my garden, it will have a good yield she would be proud of.  I plan to call her sometime soon and explain my garden and her connection to it. Also I plan to talk gardens with her, for years I cut her lawn and we always talked gardens, weather and what she would plant and grow each year.

Now for the new blog feature, on the left side of the blog there is a picture of a tomato I grew on the deck of our apartment last year.  This year I have a large garden outside in the dirt, a rain barrel, garden tools including rubber boots and I want to document it!  So Sarah and I will be blogging about it as we go and it will be full of ups and downs I am sure, but as my aunt Verna always says "we do the best we can"

Enjoy
-Bruce

Evening Action

So last night with less then an hour to go before sun set  I grabbed my bag, and a rod and headed down the street a little more then a mile to the spot I caught trout the other day.  It had been years and years since I could just grabbed my gear on a whim and headed to a small stream to try my luck  The town we moved to has fishing close by and it is all medium to small streams.  I excel at medium to smalls, for a lot of reasons but mainly because I fished water this size for over 20 years before moving to Atlanta. 

Last night was simple I grabbed my bag and my 3 wt and when to what I am going to name the bridge hole.  I jumped out the the truck slung my bag on my shoulder and took the rod out of the case.  Then stream side I strung the rod up and tried to keep one eye on the water.  The bug action was less then my last trip but there was still some action, and I saw a couple spots where fish were taking flies off the surface regularly. 

Once I was strung up I stripped a bunch of line out and landed the best roll cast I can remember doing in a long time.  It was a strong loop and when the loop stopped the fly dropped ever so softly onto the surface.  Then almost instantaneously the trout came to the surface and sucked the light Cahill in.  I set the hook and the fight was on, this fish ran up stream toward a bush that was hanging over the water.  I have been shore fishing so I did not have waders to walk into the water to defend against getting tangled in the bush.  After a couple tense moments I got the guy around the bush and pulled it ashore to my waiting wet hand.

Sorry about the water spot on the shot but I was excited to have a fish on my first cast!

Another beautiful brook trout, full of energy and some dark colors.  The rest of the time till sunset was filled with me missing dry fly hits, because I think I was day dreaming or something.  I love being in a small town with unique small waters to fish when ever I have an extra half an hour.  Now it is time to figure out how to fish for stripers because that season is just around the corner!


-Bruce

Back to the Water

So today is Good Friday, and it was a good day for me.  Sarah had an at your own pace, come when you have the time, self reflective service written down that you could go to the church and read in the sancuary.  Then there was me who picked one up, as I was headed to the stream to try to catch some trout.  These kinds of services are great to do outside and to do it stream side made it that much more meaningful.  Here is her service if you want to know what it looked like. 

Now for what I am sure you paused at and thought 'He said last Thursday that he would have a license within a week and it has been a week and a day'.  Well sorry for the delay but the house needed to be cleaned and I wanted to get some gardening and yard work done.  Also drivers licenses are expensive here in MA.  Well to make a long story short I bought both a drivers and a fishing license today and with in 5 hours I was fishing.

I took lunch to the church for Sarah (that is when I got my Good Friday service to put in my pocket).  We ate sandwiches and talked for a while, then I stopped the conversation with the question "sooo some church members said that small dam up the street gets stocked with trout right?"  to this Sarah said go ahead and fish.  So I did and it was good (see that, it is a little church joke). 

This little dam had lots of bugs raising off it and then fluttering around and falling back down.  I was excited when I saw that first ripple of a trout eating a dry fly.  The flies were very big and dark so I started with my biggest parachute Adams.  After a while I quit with the Adams fly and then continued to try everything I had in both of my dry fly boxes.  So I sat down and read that service, and looked out at these fish eating the flies that I did not have and was okay with it.  I caught one of these flies as I was leaving and it turns out I should have been throwing a Trico or a Spinner which I had neither of.

I was not ready to go home but I had done all I could do at the dam.   So I stopped at a bridge on my way home, and the same hatch was coming off there.  This hatch was not exactly the same it had some Cahill and some Caddis mixed in.  This was the ticket I was only at this bridge for less then an hour but I pulled out three nice fish.

First was a nice healthy brook trout

Next a darkly colored brown

Lastly was a little brown

 Just like that the hatch died and the wind picked up.  I was tired and hungry so I decided to call it quits.  Had the hatch still been going strong I would have thought about this for a while, but it just died so the decision to leave was easy.  When I caught the last fish I was able to stage a shot that I am going to use as a teaser for a future post. 

This is the tease shot.  

So just above that rod is a trout and above the trout is a new piece of gear that I have been testing.  I really want to take it out couple more times, but it is looking good so far.  Keep an eye out for the full review sometime in the next week.



-Bruce