Mark The Fish Fluffer

tough hole but produced a nice brown



my biggest cutt for the day

one of many



sweetness!

solid brown



i don't know why



the pig of the day



mark's best cuttie

this is an ant



the only fish on a hopper



1st fish of the day

So me and mark had arranged to fish together today up by where he lives. in his neck of the woods there was 3 options for moving water and we chose option 'p' because he had gotten permission to access the river through some private property and mark had some good success back there the other day. this time of year i always expect to be throwing hoppers or some other big dry and mark had the same idea. mark said a hopper/dropper was killing them the other day so he rigged up with that and i started with the fat albert again. as luck would have it neither one of those set-ups was working worth a shit but maybe it was just because it was still pre-noon and the sun was obscured by clouds, who knows? i gave the top water all of about an hour before i decided, due to some streamerly looking water, to throw on a tungsten coned wooley bugger. i needed the tungsten cone cause all i brought was my floating line so i needed to get the fly down some. it only took a couple of casts when i saw this good looking fish come hauling ass out of some submerged roots in hot pursuit of my fly. he swiped 2x but did not feel the hook. a couple of more casts to the same spot and he did feel the hook and he was off to the races. mark was my net boy and what a fiasco that was. the river bottom was slippery as hell and mark who was wet wading fell 2 times trying to chase after this fish. mark got a workout cause when he finally did scoop it up he was hunkered over trying to catch his breath. a solid 17" and a good start to the day. i decided i was going to stick with the streamer until mark proved that a hopper set-up was going to produce. mark did take his first fish on a hopper but nothing touched it after that and i kept asking mark, after lots more streamer action, if he was sure he didn't just want to chuck streamers. he was stubborn and kept with the hopper/dropper. it was funny cause if mark hit a hole first with no success i would usually get something on my streamer so mark would claim that he buttered up the holes for me and continued to refer to himself as the 'fish fluffer' since he was getting the holes ready for me. at one point, we came to a really nice run that had some faster water and on the other side of it was a big fallen tree that created some slack water around it. the run had some depth and some great cover for the fish. seeing this run i said there is no way we don't at least get some chases out of here. mark offered it to me first as he had to re-rig. i landed 3 fish before mark could even get his hopper tied back on. of course he would stop what he was doing to net my fish. the water was fast and he had the only net after all. mark finally started to have achange of heart about his set-up and since he didn't want me taking all the fish from that hole he asked if he could throw my set-up a few times. i gave him my rod and went to go tie on his hopper. as soon as i got his hopper tied on he hooked into a tank of a fish and when it jumped i thought it was a big cutt cause of all the red on it's side, thougth maybe it was in spawning colors. it turned out to be a big 'bow' and proved to be, at least in my opinion, the fish of the day. mark eventually got rid of the hopper and threw on a streamer and we proceeded to either get chases, hits, lose fish and catch fish the rest of the day. it was probably the best streamer day i have ever had.