North Georgia trip recap – Day 1

Back home in South Louisiana after an extended weekend in North Georgia on vacation. It is really tough to get back into the swing of things after such a great trip. In the next few days I’ll recap the trip, one day at a time. A lot of trout were caught, especially wild ones, on dries. I’ll admit none were monsters, but we did catch some solid fish. We ate well and drank well too, something that goes hand in hand with being from Louisiana I guess. My wife and I enjoyed the company of my parents and our good friends Blake and Erica, who made the road trip with us from Baton Rouge.

Thursday

We arrived in the wee hours Thursday morning after the 10 hr trip through Mississippi and Alabama to our destination north of Atlanta; “The Cabin” as it’s called by us. A place my parents have owned for several years now and is quite possibly my favorite place to be. The cabin sits on the banks of a popular trout stream and has both wild and stocked trout, with an occasional bruiser holdover. Blake and I got as much sleep as our excitement allowed and hit the stream later that morning.

Blake and I started working a bend in the creek, not wanting to venture too far from each other in hopes that one of us would catch a big trout that the other could document. It didn’t take long, and lucky for me I hooked into a good one. I was high sticking a double nymph rig and he hit the rubber legged hare’s ear with vigor. Gave me 4 good jumps and a run toward a downed tree before I could land him.

Not exactly the prettiest trout ever, the top of his tail was all jacked up, but he was every bit of 21″ so I was pretty stoked. The fight caught me a little by surprise, it’s been awhile since I caught a big trout, thank God I didn’t blow it. We didn’t get any more action in that bend so we moved upstream. We caught trout just about every place we stopped to fish, but we didn’t find any more fatties.

We packed it in that afternoon and headed up to the cabin for lunch. While eating we made the decision to hit a little creek just up the road before it got dark. This creek has a pretty awesome waterfall at it’s lower end.

Blake hooked a pretty good fish at the bottom of the falls, but he couldn’t get it to his hands before it shook the hook. We landed a lot of little wild rainbows in that creek before it got dark. It gave us a good glimpse of what the weekend had in store for us.