Nine Mile Competition Recap Part 2
- tolrogg
- Jan 6, 2024
- 5 min read
Happy New Year everyone! I pray this year treats you well and here’s to a great year of living and, of course, fishing. This part 2 of 3 in my Nine Mile Mini recap, if you missed the first part you can check it out here.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Before my second session began I was fortunate to have gotten to control the same beat or river section I had fished in the morning and was able to make some comparisons between that angler's success and my own on the exact same water. I’m not going to dive too much into what I learned, as I’ll save most of it for the last part, but it did lead me to tweak my plan heading into my second and final session.
The biggest change, I believed, I needed to make was fishing more junk flies. Flies I would consider “junk flies” are larger attractor patterns such as eggs, mops, worms, etc. The angler I watched caught fish where I didn’t produce as many in my session using this type of fly. I did use some junk to pick up a few fish, but I don’t think I utilized them enough. Now I still wanted to use my dry dropper and small nymph setup as it proved very effective for those small trout, it seemed others were often missing, but I did need to have a bit more of a balanced approach to grab more of those bigger sized fish I was missing. Not the easiest of tasks in an hour and half session I will admit.
Rigging wise I left my dry dropper setup basically alone, however I opted for a slightly larger dry fly and a bead size up on my nymph as the average water depth was a touch deeper and with more emphasize on the “junk” flies, I didn’t have a lot of time to be messing with dropper weights of my nymph. My second rod remained a single fly setup, this time with a Y2K egg pattern tied on a size 14 hook with a 3.5mm tungsten bead instead of the small nymph.
I started my session on a high bank at the bottom of my beat making a few casts to the tailout of a corner riffle just in case any fish may be holding there. With no takers I climbed down the bank and crossed the river grabbing my dry dropper setup. Just as in the morning I stayed back out of sight of the fish and was quickly rewarded with a pair of trout. A couple of empty casts led me to grab the egg rod and again I was rewarded with another trout.
Once confident I had covered the run and needing to walk in to get my fly unhooked from a stick, I moved farther upstream. The next stretch was a very long stretch of slow pool, the exact water I struggled so much with in my first session. I came up empty on a few casts and then snagged some overhanging brush on the far bank breaking off all my tippet. I retied the dry dropper setup quickly this time with a greater distance between my nymph and dry. I, also, used an even bigger dry with foam incorporated into it and an even heavier nymph. I made a few long casts upstream and fished them back to me grabbing bottom on most of them. Realizing I was beginning to waste time, I switched rods and moved to the swifter head of the run upstream. Here I quickly caught another fish on the egg before losing it too to the brush. I opted to just grab a mop from the pad on the front of my chest pack rather than diving into my fly box and that was the ticket to land another fish just a little farther up and then miss a fish in the same spot.
I continued up into what looked like a seriously productive run. It featured a downed tree which split the tailout into two separate slots that both looked like would hold at least a couple fish and the bottom of the tree faced upstream which had caused debris to pile up causing the steady and consistent riffle above to form a good sized eddy on the far side before dropping into that split tailout. I started with a few casts on the near split created by the log and to my surprise no takers. All good though, surely they had just been pushed to the far side by the anglers that had fished it earlier. No takers there either despite my precision bow and arrow casting landing it perfectly on the far side everytime…ok that's obviously a lie…haha. I did get a few good casts in there, but I also had to spend some time shaking my flies out of the tree hanging above me and recasting more than I care to admit to get somewhat of the drift I wanted. I left the split and picked up a fish right where the debris pushed the riffle into the split and missed another one there; the landed fish came to the egg and the missed fish to the mop.
Continuing upstream I was slightly discouraged and felt like I had gotten too far away from my program that had worked so well for me in the morning. I took the time to redo my dry dropper rig in order to return it to the configuration I started the session with. The next run was the exact water that had produced well with this setup, a short and shallow riffle. This produced one fish that I’ll admit was in a spot in the riffle I was not anticipating on the far side where it seemed too shallow, but wanting to cover the whole thing I cast anyway and found that fish. Another came to the net shortly after. Covering everything I could with the dry dropper I grabbed the heavy mop rig to try a precision cast under a limb hanging down. The cast was good, I just either didn’t get the fly to depth quick enough or didn’t move my line out of the way enough to swing the fly up and under because I ended my snagging the limb. To save time and likely with how shallow it was a break off probably would’ve scared the fish anyway I walked in to grab the fly and sure enough spooked a fish out.
With 15 minutes left in the session I quickly fished the remaining water in my beat with no takers, before running down again to the hole again with the log splitting it in too. Here I grabbed one last fish on the dry dropper setup in the upstream section that was a more consistent riffle. Still getting no fish to play in and around the log itself. Bummer.
I ended the session with 9 fish total for the session. Certainly not bad by any means, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough to claim the top spot for the session.
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