Opening Day

It's Saturday and opening day of the general trout season in California. This means that you can fish most places, and when I say most, there are a few places that open a little later, like Memorial Day weekend and such, but most of the creeks and rivers are now open.

When I got to Angels Creek I ran into three guys fishing in the hole I wanted to fish. Being the gentleman I am, I waited for them to catch their limit and pack it in. While I was waiting, it was mentioned that a couple of people fished the hole yesterday (the day before opening day), but according to them that was OK because the hole was below Highway 49, what ever that meant. OK my ass. There are no special regulations on this creek that allows fishing before opening day. Where is a Game Warden when you need one.

On top of that, when the three of them left, they mentioned they had 17 fish. Wait a minute, 3 times a limit of 5 = 15 not 17. Where is that Game Warden???

Plan A: Fish Tenkara. Not one bit of interest in anything on the surface.

Plan B: Fish with my fly rod with floating line (hell, it's only 3 feet deep) and a Thin Mint. No interest there either. Besides, the fish were all stockers and they were hugging the bottom so hard their fins were wearing off.

Plan C:  A man and his two children grabbed a spot next to me and were fishing orange Power Eggs and catching fish, so I went back to the truck and grabbed my little Okuma and a couple of jars of Power Bait. This was strictly fish in the barrel, fishing. Cast out a pea sized piece of Power Bait and reel in a fish. By the time I got around to doing this, they had, I think half dozen or so. I kind of backed off so the kids could catch more and just looked like I was fishing. The dad and son were doing OK, but his daughter seemed to be learning. At the beginning Dad would cast out, hook a fish, and give her the pole to reel it in. By the end, she was casting out, hooking, and reeling in her own fish. I think a new fishing girl was born. When they left, I think they had a dozen or so. I had caught 4 by then.

It seemed that the hole was fished out, so I packed up and drove to the local convenience store for a bag of ice to cover the fish and then drove to the hole by the park. There are 4 good holes to fish this creek and I wanted to see if anyone was catching anything in the others. There were two guys fishing the the park hole, but no one catching anything. Wonder if earlier fishermen cleaned it out. Anyways, after they left I gave it 15 minutes or so and didn't see anything and called it a day. I stopped by the other two holes, but here again no one was catching anything.

Yesterday I drove up the hill to check out the Consumnes River at Cat Creek Rd and PIPI Valley (I fished these two places last summer and caught a couple of native Rainbows) with the idea of fishing them tomorrow with my Tenkara rod, but a couple of things will prevent this. One, Cat Creek Rd. is still under a couple of feet of snow and inaccessible. PIPI Valley was accessible, but the river was about 4 times it's normal size and off color. Snow run off. So I'll wait on those for another day. Got to get this Tenkara thing going.

I'm thinking a trip to Icehouse Reservoir is on tap for some of those nice holdover Rainbows. Maybe next week. Oh, I gave the 4 to Bob for credit for next years driveway plowing.

That's it for today. 

Mark