Shop Day Off Trip Report

We took a much needed break from shop life and got the team out for a day on the water. While weather conditions maybe weren't ideal, it was the best day on all of our schedules to make a day trip happen, so to the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene we went!

Like the weather this time of the year can be a mixed bag of bugs. Any one day you could see salmonflies, skwala stones, pmd's, grey drakes, yellow sally stones, March browns, and caddis. We didn't check off the whole list, but we certainly saw a mix of insects.

With colder temps, hatches were dampered until late afternoon which also made for later day dry fly action. We took the boats out around 5pm and really probably could have stayed on the water another hour or so as the fishing was improving on the surface. Morning and mid day was best subsurface. The upcoming forecast will shift that dry fly window up a bit and make for better dry fly fishing earlier in the day again.

There certainly were some slow stretches but we found fish throughout our float and overall fish size was pretty good. We will take quality over quantity anyday! Plus I'm a believer that those stormy, cloudy, inclement weather days bring out the bigger fish. Like the old Simms slogan... forget the forecast!

We enjoyed our day out of the shop together and will probably work a few more of these into the regularly scheduled program before it gets to be too long again.