This will be a short post folks!

It was a warm day in Slate Run. A little warmer than seasonable – mid to upper 70’s.

I’ve been skunked the past two times out on Pine Creek and I was starting to think that I needed to go back to elementary school to learn how to fly fish.

It always bruises the ego a bit, when I don’t catch a fish and when I change flies at a rate that would impress the Indy 500 pit crews. I tried everything…. ok, maybe not EVERYTHING but, you get the idea. There was a light yellow colored mayfly that sporadically seemed to show up, caddis that would float upstream in the air – on occasion, and I’ll throw in that there were more than a few sizes of all mentioned here. I even tied on a trico thinking that if they were going for midges that THAT would be close enough to get a look. No such luck.

I did walk the coastline a bit and saw an interesting flower.

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I am amazed that I’ve seen such a diversity of wildflowers this summer and fall. One can truly see a lot of beauty if you slow down a bit and just look at your surroundings.

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Back to the task at hand – I tried everything (sort of) – a grey thing, a yeller thing, a Trico, an Ant, a Stimulator that didn’t stimulate so much as a look.

So I broke down and finally rigged up to fish a midge. I’ve been thinking and saying to myself, “must be midges”….. “must be midges” for SOME time during the last two adventures. Ok, I have a 5x tappered leader on and I had 6x tippet on the end of that. My 7x spool has been suspect of premature breakage and I wasn’t confident that if I went to 7x, that I’d keep any fish on for more than a milli-second.

But did I listen to reason? No! Of course not. I took a little more off the 5x leader and looped a 7x tippet onto the leader. Then, the midge.

But, you get the idea of the scale – small… extremely small.

Result:

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Only one fish but it went for the fly that I tied on after two outtings of trying stuff that clearly didn’t interest the fish whatsoever (the chubs didn’t count)!

I’ll take it!

Till we see each other again… UB