Final Score:16 to 4-A Win Win Situation

     Coming off a week where my fifth grade team of teachers prepared for and held our annual "Creek Walk Day," I hadn't slept much.  The carrot in front of me, however, was an end of the season, trout fishing run to one of my favorite creeks north of here on the following day.  Not that I needed much of a carrot, since I really do love our day teaching outside, down along the creek, near our school.  Looking back, teaching by the creek was probably more like a booster rocket propelling me upwards and outwards to a space of water that few have a desire to tread.  I awoke at 5:00 and was on the road by 5:20.  Although stretches were thick with fog, I reached my destination by 6:20.  I smiled to myself at the humor behind that.  One hour.  As a math and science guy, I love the intricacies of numbers.

     I got my stuff ready, put my waders on, and started to hike in.  It was still fairly dark and the morning was supposed to start with cloud cover, but there was enough to see without the use of my headlamp.  Along the way I passed a marshy area surrounded by cattails.  It was alive with the sounds of a familiar friend of small creeks I've fished before.  The brilliantly marked wood duck, in the form of a large flock, was getting edgy and preparing to alight for the day's journey south to some unknown destination.  I guessed at over a hundred of them.  

I had heard them when I had first gotten out of my Jeep and now I was right beside the shallow pond; unbeknownst to them.  I decided to video tape them, to capture some of what I was witnessing.  I'm not going to lie.  It turned out pretty cool.  After several squadrons took off, I continued down the lane, through the field, prepped my pole, and entered the water. 

I immediately realized that I had incorrectly guessed where some of the holes were in my waders the night before; when I had applied some neoprene patch.  I could feel a cold trickle in my left boot.  

     No matter, I made my way around a few bends and finally caught a 9 and a half inch brown trout.  I quickly unhooked it and released it.  After that, it was "slim pickin's" for quite a while, as they say, until I had fished for well over an hour.  Slowly, the tide turned then and I started catching fish.  At the same time, the sun began to appear intermittently between the clouds.  Over a decent stretch I caught sixteen total brook trout.  I loved looking at their beautiful colors and markings.  I had thought of keeping a few if I had caught any around ten inches but all of them were in the eight to nine inch range.  I released them all back into the creek from whence they came.  I finally did stop long enough to take a picture of one of them.

 In one hole alone I caught about five or six brook trout.  It was really fun.  There is nothing quite like a little action from a native fish to keep you going.

     Soon after that, a brown trout just shy of fifteen inches, shot out from under the bank at my spinner.  I was suddenly busy with my ultra light pole bent over, as I stood in a knee deep bend of the creek.  I decided to keep this one fish and save it for a meal back home later this fall.  It's always entertaining to have a big brown explode out from under a bank when you least expect it; especially in the bright light. 

Typically they hang tight until the darkness between dusk and dawn, but occasionally they surprise you, and after catching the lovely little brookies, it can be downright shocking to see a torpedo of yellowish-brown come shooting out at your lure.  Humorously I caught two more browns after that on the next couple of bends.  Both were small in size and released.  The first of those two was so small, in fact, that I actually measured it.  It was four inches long.  The humor was that it hit a number two Mepps.  The lure was almost as long as it was.  It's a testament to the feistiness of these fish.

     Finally I stopped and decided it had been enough.  It was close to noon, so I sat on the bank and had my lunch of a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich, on rye bread, with a side of raisins and corn chips.  I washed it down with some water and started hiking out.

     I eventually hit the remnant of a path, not much bigger than an old deer trail.  It ran through a small grove of poplar trees.  As I said in the beginning, I had been tired coming into today, and with the drive home coming up, I knew what would happen.  I'd get sleepy and struggle to keep my eyes open on hilly, curvy, country roads.  Today, luckily enough, I had thrown in my net-like hammock.  

I decided to string it up and watch the clouds go by while listening to the sand hill cranes in the field off in the distance and a flock of blue jays in the trees nearby.  I took several pictures to try to capture the moment, and then a video of the wind in the poplar leaves above me, before nodding off.  

I only slept about fifteen minutes but it was just enough time to take the edge off and allow the water to drain down the leg of my waders and soak into my shorts.

     As I hiked the last of the way out to my Jeep, I took a picture of the autumn air hanging over the prairie, and a video to capture the sound of the crickets in the mid-day heat.  What a great way to wrap up the final days of Wisconsin's Trout Season.

See you along The Way...