A New Year.

Happy New Year everyone. Today was a really good day here in NEC (North East Colorado). Its been a long, cold and wet late fall and winter so far. But we have had some really nice days the past week and today was great. Almost 60 degrees, sunny, fishy. So kevin and I headed to river after lunch for our first outing of the year. The river was clear, and maybe a little higher than normal. We started out by swinging some wet flies down and accross covering the bends and runs. After a few smaller chubs hooked up, I switched to a micro bugger that I've dubbed a "Sand Sage Special". Its a standard size 10 wet fly hook, white tail, white body, grizzley hackle. This seems to be "THE" fly pattern for this stream. I like to fish them both upstream and drift them like a nymph, as well as cast them down and accross into a swing then strip them back as a streamer. After the change up we started hooking into some bigger fish. Kevin was working small brown nymph and I was swinging my bugger through the cut banks when I hooked into something with real weight. A nice little brown came flying out of the water and threw the hook just a few feet from me. Kevin caught some decent chubs and i caught a really nice fat one that measured in at 10 inchs. Between that and loosing the trout I would say we had a pretty good first fishing trip for 2015. I'm really looking forward to this new year. My wife got me a new tying vice for christmas and I've been tying like crazy. My bass box is stacked real nicely and my small stream box is really looking good. I know I have talked about simplicity before and this year I am really going to focus on that. I went through notes from the last two years and I have been tying only about two dozen patterns total. My bass box has a really good selection of Clouser Minnows, Gurglers, Schminnows, and a couple patterns of my own. My small stream box has some Miracle Midges, Micro Buggers, Elk Hair Caddis, wingless adams, assorted soft hackle wets, and some really simple dubbed nymphs. My small stream box is also doubling as my carp box. So now I'm down to two fly box's total.   I really like the way they are stream lined now. We're going to get more into this in later posts but for now its good to be back and its going to be a good year.