Pocket Water

I can’t say I frequent this stretch of river, yet it’s possibly my favourite and most memorable place to spend a day on the water. This is certainly one of the more scenic sections of river in southern Ontario. I rarely see another person here during a full day of fishing, which is likely due to the difficulty accessing it (a very long hike is required) and the fact that so many other more accessible sections of river offer easier and larger trout. For me, it’s a day out to enjoy the scenery and peace and quiet. The fact that I might also catch a few fish is an added bonus.

Scenic pocket water on a southern Ontario river

Scenic pocket water on a southern Ontario river

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Speaking of Spiders…

In my last entry I posted a picture of a nasty spider that crawled out of my waders and onto my arm. Well, that reminded me of another spider I found while fishing the Credit River a few years ago and it could have eaten the previous one for lunch.  Seriously, this was the largest wild/native spider I’ve ever come across and it scared the hell out of me.  I had no idea there were spiders this large in Southern Ontario.

Fishing Spider encountered on the Credit River.

Unfortunately the picture quality is not too great as the camera I was carrying at the time was pretty bad.  It’s hard to get a sense of the size of this thing, but it was resting on a huge boulder in the middle of the river and was probably about the size of a child’s hand.  Apparently it’s called a Fishing Spider (genus Dolomedes).

Au Sable River Trip

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I took a well deserved week-long trip to a favourite destination of ours on the banks of Au Sable River in Grayling, Michigan.

Grayling is a fly fishing paradise.  I won’t go into detail on why this is such a great fly fishing town, but suffice it to say that it’s surrounded by several blue ribbon trout rivers, it’s host to river stretches with nicknames like the “Holy Water”, it’s got more fly shops than most towns have gas stations and it’s the birthplace of Trout Unlimited… you get the idea.

I made an effort not to spend too much time on the water this trip, since my wife doesn’t fish and we had other things planned for the week.  Most of the time I didn’t stray too far from the place we were staying.  Located on the Holy Water, one of (if not the) best stretches of trout water on the entire Au Sable, it’s just too convenient.

The main hatches for the week included Tricos in the mornings, terrestrials (mostly ants) in the afternoons and some sporadic BWO hatches in the evenings.  No overly large trout were had during this trip, but a nice assortment of brown, rainbow and brook trout were caught.  That’s one of the things I love about the Au Sable in this stretch… all three trout species are very plentiful and on any given day it’s entirely possible to hook up with trophy sizes in all of these fish.

Au Sable Brown Trout

Au Sable Brook Trout

Au Sable Rainbow Trout

And then there’s the night fishing…

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