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Monday, June 28, 2010

One of those nights

Well, where do I start, I'm in a bit of a daze as it is 12:21 a.m early Monday morning and I am just returning from the Dead River. After working on the new house most of the weekend, I was able to steal away around 3pm this afternoon and fish with a good friend of mine who runs a sporting camp where I used to work. We arrived at the river around 5p.m . The evening began with me hooking a respectable Brookie on my first cast. I went on to land several other Brookies and one handsome 18" Salmon over the next few hours as Carter held onto a solid skunk for no apparent reason. We worked over an area that I refer to as The Glide, where quite often after 5p.m, it becomes completely overtaken by large rising Salmon. This was not the case today however as the hours slowly inched toward dark and only a rise or two occurred. Upset by this I all but gave up and moved down below the island where Jesse once lost the largest Landlocked Salmon I have ever seen. I noticed that Carter had gone missing upstream for quite sometime, and I remembered him mentioning to me as I walked downstream that it was a shame that we had to bail on a spot in the river that I had done so well by in the past. I heard what I thought was a distant whistle but it sounded as if it came from the woods to my east so I brushed it off. Again I heard the whistle some 10 minutes later followed by a yell. It was now 8:30p.m and I was in an all out run upriver because I had put two and two together as to what was going on. At 8:15 Carter had seen one rise turn into five and then into 50. He had landed four 18" Brookies in that fifteen minute period. I can only describe what I saw when I arrived at The Glide as pure madness. There were a dozen individual rises on the water at any single time. It had erupted beyond my wildest imagination. We fished this position under the same rising conditions from 8:30 until 10 p.m and landed over 50 fish....I shit you not. The smallest was 13" with many around 20". It was a 50/50 mix of Salmon and Brookies with the majority of the Brookies measuring around 16". I can only say that I took a few pictures of the 18" salmon I caught early on and not a single one of the epic stretch we had from 8:30 to 10. Each fish was battled as if they didn't even matter. If you lost it, you threw your fly out and you were immediately tight again. As we left the river Carter said out loud, "If my wife told me tonight that I could never fish again, I would be fine with that". He and I both knew this wasn't true, but the prior hour and a half had been so damn good that it was almost believable.

4 comments:

Morrell said...

someone's on a roll. What was the bug du jour?

Jesse Lance Robbins said...

lordy. a boiling river, not to be forgotten soon. sometimes having the camera doesn't matter.

had a similar event this morning, but only for about 20 minutes. so many bugs on the water i could tell which were sport's.

i wonder if that landlocked i hooked still lives?

Keith said...

Nice work wilkie! Who is this Carter? Is he a legend?

Andrew Wilkie said...

This Carter character is indeed a legend. He is 40 but you would think he was our age. He would fit in very well on the OI if I could actually get him down to the Cape. As a matter of fact, Alden Camps closes the first week of Sept. so if there are any late season canyon trips I could probably twist his arm to join us.