Rapidan Camp

Last week I decided to spend two days out on the Rapidan in the upper portions just past the Rapidan Camp. The Rapidan Camp was where the senior members of Hoover's staff stayed while Hoover and his family resided in the main cabin during summer trips. Today, the Rapidan Camp is a cooperative campground while Hoover's main cabin is a tourist attraction in the park.

Back in the day, I was researching the history of Rapidan Camp and came across some awesome footage of President Hoover fishing the Rapidan. He allowed a bunch of reporters to come and videotape him. Impressingly, he was still able to catch fish. Of course, I wouldn't say his one-handed technique is the best i've ever seen.

Pretty amazing footage. This video comes courtesy of C-SPAN's Presidential Libraries. To check out more videos of him fishing and hanging out around Camp Rapidan, check out the C-SPAN site.

Now on to the fishing report. Temperatures were high. During the afternoon, the air temperatures soared to around 95 degrees. This really pushed the brookies deep. But once the heat broke in the late afternoon, fishing really picked up. Each hole started producing 4-5 brookies of average size with a couple 10 inchers feeding in the back eddys. By the end of the first day, I'd probably pulled in over 30 fish.

The next morning, due to poor sleeping conditions (it was too hot for a sleeping bag) I woke up and started fishing around 6 a.m. I now intend on getting out to the river that early on my future trips as the fishing was on fire. The upper portions of the river above Rapidan Camp held many more fish than the lower sections in my opinion. The fish were all about 7-9 inches but I didn't see any of the lunkers (a relative term) like the ones you can find in the lower sections. They were all actively feeding on top and quickly took to my improved parachute adams (I started using a two-toned parapost on my parachute adams to help make then even more visible).

The particular highlight of the morning was one pool where I remained sitting on a boulder at the back end of the pool and from there I pulled in 5 9" brookies quickly from each of the feeding lanes that were present.

Great trip overall. I highly recommend you camp in the upper regions in order to get an early start on the fishing.

Of course, for now, the Rapidan is highly unfishable. All of this rain we've been getting (and will continue to get the rest of this week) have pushed the water levels dangerously high for fishing. Check out this USGS map of Virginia:

As you can see (the purple, blue, and light blue represent high, 90th percentile, and over 75th percentile respectively) the water levels in much of the state are extremely high. The Rapidan is running around 350 CFS, which is way over the 80th percentile.

So it's time to hold off on the fishing for a while. Perhaps studying pathology and pharmacology would be more worthwhile.