July 4th. and dive bombing blood suckers

Spent yesterday with Rob and Cleo fishing. Our trip started up in Massachusetts where the Farmington River runs into the Colebrook Reservoir. The water was a decent level but man oh man, it was h-o-t.

I rigged up the Mystic 4wt. switch and one of my leaders; only I took off the 30# butt section. Why? I left the intermediate poly-leader on and it is next to impossible to cast with that heavy butt section. The next time I am out I am going to take the poly-leader off and use the entire leader/tippet that I make.

I found some nice shade to cast and swing flies through and worked on that for a while. Since I was wet wading I eventually ended up kneeling down in the river as I tried to keep cool. I am sure that must have looked "strange" but hey, it worked. I was still able to reach all the water I wanted to and keep cool at the same time. 

After working that part of the river for a while we moved on down to the Still River. With all the rain we have had it had a pretty good flow rate as well. We fished that for a spell as well. Didn't see any fish and no hits.

We moved on down to the Farmington at Church Pool because we found a friend of ours fishing under the bridge. Jerry was using his Sage TCX 5wt.. and 330 Scandi. Since there were too many people splashing and swimming and having a grand ol' time for their holiday we headed down the back side of Church and fished down to the wood shop. It was nice and shady and while the river was a bit high through there it wasn't too bad. However, what was bad were the mosquitoes. Holy smokes, Batman. 

Those dive bombing blood sucking monsters were everywhere and they were not shy. We had some pretty good action though this stretch of water and by this time I had switched to the Mystic 9',  4wt. Reaper. That is a nice rod and has a pretty good snap to it. We found some browns but the water was on the warm side. It has been a very strange year for fishing the Farmington and right now it is not one of my best. So much water that it floods some days and then tapers off only to flood again. Right now the rains have held off so perhaps the flow rate will stabilize.

Cleo was a sport getting in and out of the car and standing in the water trying to cool off. She even found some mud to lay in and take a long nap. She probably thought we were all crazy but I can tell you that despite the heat and humidity we still had a good time.