Mossy Creek Finally Delivers

After about 5 trips out to Mossy Creek with only meager results, I finally was able to pull in some decent sized brown trout. Perhaps it was the rainy weather, or the change in my retrieve, but whatever it was, it finally made for good fishing.

Yesterday I went out by myself as the folks over at the VDGIF were unable to send out the passes to the other VAMFF guys who were planning on coming along. While this was unfortunate, it did give me a chance to try out new flies and explore the creek a little more.

I parked at the church and headed upstream fishing extremely fast. I only hit the water with streamers where there was a decent hole for fish to hold in next to the far shore. (In my opinion, fishing the middle of the stream is a waste of time. Only extremely active/stupid fish will chance being out in the middle. The larger wiser trout have found overhanging ledges and fallen debris next to the banks to keep them safe.) So I headed upstream in this fashion until I literally got to the end of the road. The public section of the stream ends in a nice little convergence where the "mossyness" of the creek is quite apparent.

The whole trip upstream I was dead drifting kreelexes (including some of my own versions of the fly). On the trip upstream I had only one trout take but he got off before I even had a chance to see how big he was. For what it was worth, he felt big...

I also saw a large trout way upstream practically near the end of the public section that was sipping flies off the top. I unfortunately couldn't get him to take. From what I could tell he was sipping on subsurface flies that were extremely small. Unfortunately, my griffith's gnats and my comparaduns weren't tricking him.

After a disappointing first 2 hours, I headed back to the stretch of water near the parking lot. At that point I decided to mix things up. I started using a quick retrieve in which I let the fly dead drift downstream a little ways to get some depth to it and then started retrieving about 8 inches of line as fast as I could as the streamer swung out across the pools. On my second try of this I hooked a good sized brown trout which somehow popped off my kreelex before I could get the net in the water. I first chalked the change in success up to the new retrieve but then noticed the rain had finally started to come down so perhaps it was just the change in the weather....

I then kept fishing downstream for about 30 minutes and hauled in two nice sized browns pretty much one after the other. It was awesome to finally pull in some trout of this creek with some size to them. Beautiful fish that looked extremely healthy. I would have kept fishing but I started getting sloppy on my cast and the rain wasn't making things too pleasant either. All in all though, it was an awesome day out there. It solidified, yet again, my thoughts that the kreelex is the best streamer out there for fishing in Virginia. Thank you Chuck Kraft.

Here's another pictures of one of the browns: (I realize that I have too many pictures of me holding my fish awkwardly, I'm going to have to mix up how I do this without keeping the trout out of the water for too long.)