Took a trip upstate this past weekend with the intention of fishing the Ausable. I arrived Saturday night at the Wilmington Notch campground to air temperatures of sub 30 degrees at night, which made sleeping in my tent a bit unpleasant. It seems a cold front had rolled in over night and really cooled things off. I had hired guide Rich Garfield to take me out on the Ausable on Sunday morning, but when I met with him that day he advised me that I would be better off fishing another river where we wouldn't be beat by the wind and cold all day. So we headed north to a small river that I'll leave unnamed at his request. We recorded a water temperature of 51 degrees when we arrived and the fishing started off slow. I began stripping Rich's signature streamer, the Sirloin through several deep pools, and was getting some good flashes from large browns, but I couldn't hook up. Two pools and about 45 minutes later I hooked into a 15" wild brown that put a nice bend in my little 3 weight rod. Meanwhile, the air was warming and the full sun had brought the water up almost seven degrees, bringing out some sporadic olives and hendricksons. The fishing really turned on at this point, with browns and brookies attacking just about everything we threw at them. I had a good sized brookie jump completely out of the water twice to try to get the dry I was feeding him. I ended up landing two wild browns and I lost count of all the brookies, which ranged from about 3" all the way up to the 10 or so inch brookie in the pictures. This was my second trip out with Rich, and each time he's brought me to unpressured water thats absolutely loaded with fish. | 
05-17-2007
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