Deep Snow Minnesota Fly Fishing Success (Failure)

Sometimes we need to find success in a fishing failure. I had the ability to carve out a small window of time to fly fish east of Rochester, MN after some difficult travel, a ton of great meetings, and deep snow. I don’t know about you, but hiking through a couple of feet of fresh snow to get to the river is awesome! I was just there a month ago, and there was no snow! There were no tracks besides deer tracks and snow still on every tree, simply beautiful. Cold, but beautiful. I dreamed of catching just one fish to post next to the perfect white snow for a photo, but I came up short.  

On the positive side, I did remember how easy it is to change out of a suit in the back seat of a Chevy Mailbu! Superman has his telephone booth, I have my rental car. This is where planning becomes important. Hangers for suit coat and pants, check. Simply move the drivers seat all the way up and you have a TON of space. It’s been a long time since I’ve pulled this trick off, but I’m glad I still got it. I didn’t have space in my carry on for waders or boots this trip, so I was going to try from shore. Waders and boots lost space to a significant amount of presentation materials for my meetings this week. We all have to make sacrifices when fly fishing during a business trip.  All of us that travel for business CAN make time to search for fish if we plan our trip well.  Same goes for family vacations, I've brought a super compact travel fly rod with me on almost all our families trips for years.  

I’ve mentioned before that fly fishing to me is the best way to clear my head. It’s almost impossible to worry about the day to day issues we all have while concentrating on placing the fly in the perfect place on the river. Everyone on earth needs this Zen breather in life to remain a positive person in my opinion. My only advice, don’t get lazy like I did today, and end up with a tangled rig riddle that no man could solve. Today, I started with a two fly rig under a small indicator.  I had a pheasant tale up top for the attractor and a black zebra midge down below. Thankfully I got to work a couple of holes before creating the tangle of all tangles. I wish I had a good excuse, but it happens to us all.  I wanted to take a picture of my mess, but instead  I took a deep breath and moved on.  

I chose to rig up a dry and dropper rig, even though I hadn’t seen any rising fish yet. I love the dry and dropper rig. To me, it’s the best rig in fly fishing. The dry is the indicator, the dropper normally catches the fish. But every once in awhile, the fish rise to eat the dry, which every fly fisherman knows is awesome. Today, even though it was fifteen degrees out and a few feet of snow on the ground, the only fish I saw all day rose to take my dry. It wasn’t a big fish, but it came up, tried it’s best, and just missed the fly at the last second. You all know how moving it is to see a trout rise to your fly, regardless if you catch it or not.  

Today, we brought no fish to hand, but I’m ok with that. What a great afternoon to get outside, breath in some fresh air, and enjoy the quiet sport. It's better to get out, than not to get out.  I pointed the rental car back north east to Minneapolis to meet clients for dinner.  

Next time!  

Pescador on the Fly