Swing and a Miss

After lunch I thought it would be a good idea to head to a small creek that, according to my research, held brook trout. I wanted to catch back up to Blake on the species count so we’d only have brown and rainbow trout to target the rest of the trip if we were to complete the Arizona wild trout challenge. One thing that was very prominent when driving across Arizona was that you didn’t have to look far to find the effects of wildfire. This area was hit hard in 2011 by the Wallow fire and things have been recovering ever since. That fire was actually started by two guys who were camping so we definitely had to be on guard at night around the campfire because I’d hate to be known for something like that.

Naturally Blake caught the first fish, a brown trout. He was fishing behind me so I was doing something wrong. That fish took either a small streamer or a nymph, I don’t remember exactly, but I know it wasn’t a dry, which is what I was throwing. I switched up and soon had the pleasure of bringing a fish to hand of my own.

It was also a brown trout. I was happy to have caught something when the bites were hard to come by because at this point it was looking like catching fish of any type here was going to be tough.

We covered some good looking water, but turned up very few fish. A bit demoralized we turned back and headed to vehicle. I don’t know what was up with that creek, the water clarity wasn’t as good as it was as in the last three creeks we fished, it had a slight stain to it, but I really don’t know the area well enough to know if that was normal or not. Sometimes you just don’t catch fish, I don’t really know, I just know we struck out on brook trout there and so I’d have to figure something out over the next couple of days if I wanted to complete the challenge.

We headed back to camp and prepared for steak night, a good consolation for a tough afternoon. Mother Nature also rewarded us for our troubles on the creek because on the way back to camp we were treated with a pack of bighorn sheep on the side of the road.