TR: skunked

Don't you just *hate* when that happens?

I should have known things weren't going to go well for me yesterday
afternoon. The first sign was when I went to change flies and discovered
I'd left my fly box back at the car. Oh, well, I thought. The
quarter-mile walk would do me good. The good news was that the box was
still on top of the car.

There were several hatches going on, which led to the second error:
matching the hatch. I just happened to (eventually) have the right size
and pattern to match the bugs, but they weren't having any of it. I
tried dries, emergers, and nymphs to complete the cycle - nada, zip,
zilch. I got a lot of splashy refusals, which normally leads me to
change size. That didn't do the trick this time.

As I was walking out, a gentleman was exiting the river just a bit
upstream from me. As we chatted, he told me about the four fish he had
caught in the last half-hour, one of them a 24-inch rainbow. He was
using a beetle pattern and something that looked suspiciously similar to
a pass lake. Doh!

The good news is that I *finally* found and sealed a hole in one of the
booties of my waders; this after going through a whole tube of Aquaseal
on the seams. Woo-HOO! Dry feet! The hole was made by my big toenail in
the booty roof and virtually invisible. I just happened to feel the weak
spot as I was patching the seams. It was those freakin' short Chota
boots that claimed to be a size 14. If any roffian wears a size 13 and
would like a good slightly-worn pair of Chotas, let me know. The 14s
should fit perfectly.
--
TL,
Tim
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http://css.sbcma.com/timj