Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

I was up early Saturday morning cooking baked potatoes for the trip. I was out the door and onto McDonalds for coffee with a pile of streamers in my hand that I tied the night before.

I met Anthony Williams who is a co-founder of Calvary Outfitters http://www.cbcol.net/page.cfm/747 and Chris Robinson who is a regular attendee at the monthly meetings. Anthony and Chris live in Murfreesboro, TN, Anthony is a regular on the boat, but this was Chris’ first time on the boat as well as his first time fishing with a fly rod. Anthony had set up our trip by telling Chris “the weather looks good for Saturday”.

We were on the Caney Fork about 8:30 a.m., The Army Corps was cranking one generator and the snow was coming down sideways. Yes, Chris did mention Anthony’s statement of “the weather looks good for Saturday”. I’ve been out in worse weather, but Chris was a newbie……at that time in the float anyway, and had yet to experience a truly bad weather day.

For the first few minutes we worked with Chris’ timing, but it did not take long for him to get into a rhythm. Within 15 minutes Chris caught his first trout, had the hero shot and was casting for another. Before we left our first stop Chris had 5 fish including a brown.

Anthony was trying several different streamer combinations, fielding weather questions from Chris, while catching his share of fish.

We were off to pound the banks. We watched fish after fish come up from the deep to chase, examine and even hit the streamers. There is nothing like seeing a trout chase a streamer, take a shot at it, miss and come back for two and sometimes three more takes.

Before lunch we ended up back on Clousers, similar to what we fished this time last year. We started picking up larger fish as we hit the better lies in the river. Anthony caught a large bow and a nice brown when we stopped at one of the better lies in the river.

Then……we had lunch, which consisted of:

Ritz Crackers and Crab Dip
Chicken Sandwiches
Baked Potatoes
Fruit Salad
Soft Drinks
and a warm fire.

Since it was my “lunch break” I took a few minutes to fish. Chris came down to join me and landed the biggest bow of the day, while I managed the net. After lunch the water began to go down and we began our float out. We lost a nice fish a few miles down from the dam , but before we made it to the ramp we had a nice double of two 16” bows.

It did stop snowing, but the weather never really did warm up. We pulled into the ramp just about dark, we were off the river and on the road just after the sun went down. On the way home we stopped by McDonalds for one more cup of coffee, which ended the day much like it started.