A good friend of mine was in town visiting this weekend, and mentioned he’d like to try fly fishing.  I’ve taught quite a few people how to fly fish over the years, and I’m always excited for the opportunity to teach someone new.  It feels great to share my passion with someone, and to see them feel the same excitement I do when they hook a big trout.  With all the recent rain, we headed over to the swift on Sunday, and spent the day down below the Route 9 bridge.   See my previous post for more info on fishing below the bridge. One thing I noticed is that the mosquitoes this year are ten times as bad as they usually are.  I guess that’s the price we’re paying for all this rain, as the mosquitoes have had more breeding grounds in the form of standing water.  Long story short, take some bug spray with you when you head out to your local stream.

On Sunday, my friend Eric and I caught a grand slam mix of brook, brown, and rainbow trout on the swift.  We started out with a quick casting lesson, as Eric had never cast a fly rod before.  I was having an extremely lucky day, and caught a big brook trout on my first cast while trying to teach Eric how to do an overhead cast.  We both had a good laugh about it, and I jokingly said, “well,that’s basically all there is to it”.

Eric quickly got up to speed with casting, and caught his first trout on a dry fly!  It was a size 24 parachute adams, which I consider to be one of the most reliable flies out there.  We spent a few hours down below the cady lane bend, and caught several more brook trout of varying sizes.

We finished up the day in a skinnier section of water where I taught Eric the basic methods of tight lining.  It was in this section that Eric landed his nicest fish of the day, which was a sizeable brown trout.  All in all, we had a great day on the river.