Magical

We have all had one of these days on the stream or in our best dream.

Ken Thompson and I met on an Iowa Fishing Board His handle on there is dryfly. I had made an open ended invitation to any of the members of that board to come fish with me some time. Ken is originally from Iowa but when he retired he and his wife moved down to San Angelo, Texas. This is where his wife is from. Ken usually makes a yearly trek up to Iowa each year to fish. He decided that 1,440 miles from Texas to Iowa was a long haul and what was 50 more miles to fish with me. We met in Gays Mills at 7am 9/17/10. We had talked prior and Ken was not a big fish guy. He much preferred numbers to big fish.

The day started early at the Gays Mills Gas Station. We drove by a brown trout stream on the way there. It was too tempting so we fished it for an hour. Ken had three bites and one brown to hand. I had four bites and three browns to hand. Off we went to my brookie stream.

The brookie stream was testing our patience at first. Ken hung up in a tree that I like to call “Ron” because Ron Benish has been hooked in it so many times I named it after him. While Ken was unhooking his fly I scored my first brookie of the day.

Ken tried a couple other flies with no success. We finally decided on a size 14 beadheaded pheasant tail. This was the last fly Ken had to tie on that day.

We got to one hole and the brookies started to hammer his indicator. Before we knew it the indicator became loose and when the brookie slammed the indicator Ken set the hook and the indicator slid down the line and hooked 4 separate brookies this way.

On one hole Ken was casting and his back cast picked something up and the fly hit the water and it looked like Ken had changed to a dry. I made the comment to Ken: “Why did you change to a dry?” “The pheasant tail was still working well.” Before Ken could respond a brookie hammered Ken’s dry.

It was “NOT” a dry. Ken had picked up a milk weed fuzzy on his backcast. This was only the beginning of the feeding frenzy. I counted 13 casts to that hole by Ken with 11 brookies landed.

Ken had never had a double before and the hole in front of us screamed “Double” Typically when i fish a double rig I am untying knots all day but I thought this was a “magical day” and Ken had driven all the way up from Texas and I was going to get his a double. Ken put a size 16 pheasant tail dropper on.

6 casts later Ken had 4 doubles and then casted another 6 casts and had hook ups on 5 others.

We fished until 1:30pm. I quit counting the trout at noon. We had many more to hand in the last one and half hours. The noon count was 130 brook trout between the two us. None of them were little either. Ken worked some Iowa magic by way of Texas.