Everything went basically according to plan this weekend - the weather was poor, heads were up, and a few browns were getting after it.
I only had about 90 min of light Friday evening, so I pulled streamers around boulders for a half mile below the Reynolds Pass bridge. I moved about a dozen fish, but didn't hook into anything verifiably noteworthy. There was one little brown that came shooting up through 4' of heavy water to swipe at my natural/yellow double bunny the instant it touched the water, so that was cool.
I hit the river again around 11:00am on Saturday. The temp was in the mid 30's with periods of sun and relative calm between snow squalls. I started the morning fishing a sculpin and beadhead pheasant tail under a bobber. Twenty uneventful minutes later I spotted the first head.
Even with ideal conditions it's not easy to spot risers and keep track of your fly in the riffles and turbulent slicks up there, but the flat light and snow were making it really tough. Still, if you watched carefully, there were fish sipping all over the place. I'm still not sure if they were targeting the few very small mayflies or the even smaller midges, but small to medium trout were pounding anything size 20 or smaller that maintained a dead drift for more than a few seconds.
There were some larger trout porpoising in skinny water just inside the main current, but I was only able to get one take; the heavy rainbow pulled some line and pulled a few aerials before breaking me off.
Anyway, the constant removal of hooks from lips had numbed my fingers, so I decided to switch back to a nymph rig and hope to twitch-n-drift my way into something more substantial. I've landed fish up to 24" in this stretch by high-sticking through the fast pocket water with super heavy flies and a handful of splitshot (although, I'm usually doing it in May or June w/ black rubberlegs). While I didn't land either, that method put me in contact with two really big trout on Saturday. Aside from the treacherous wading, the trouble with fishing big boulder strewn water is that you generally land only a fraction of the fish you stick. In any case, it's worth it to me just to hear my reel scream.
Here are a few other photos from Saturday:
