The weather is weird here. It snows a bunch then it gets warm and everything melts. Repeat. The river has a nice stain right now from the fly water to the Big South. The ice has broken up in the lower river and the river below the Big South is most likely quite stained. With highs in the low 50s on Monday the steelhead and trout fishing has turned on. We heard the steelhead fishing was particularly good on Monday. Seth was up yesterday and we stripped streamers for trout and stuck a couple decent fish but we didn’t roll anything to get excited about. No luck with the steelhead, but others on the river had a little better luck.
It’s weird to head out and strip streamers for trout on Feb 1st and it’s pretty cool to stick a few, particularly after last year’s brutal winter. This weather will make for a strange winter and spring steelhead season as the fall and winter run fish will spawn as soon as the water warms up into the 40s, which it was very close to doing on Monday. There are some worked up gravels throughout the fly water, but we didn’t see any fish on them yesterday.
