Happy Mother's Day! Today I drove back from a weekend fishing trip up to Yellow River in Northeast Iowa. Elizabeth was nice enough to watch the kids while I was up there. So after I got home I took the boys to the grocery store and had Nolan pick out a bouquet of flowers for her, and I also made some homemade chocolate-covered strawberries. Then we had some sushi tonight to help celebrate Mother's Day.
As for my fishing trip, I drove up Thursday night and spent the weekend camping with the Seago brothers (Jon, Matthew, and Jeremy), their dad Clyde, Tyler & Jordan Wright, and their friend Keith. Three of them were also turkey hunting earlier this week (Keith, Matthew, and Tyler), and by the time I arrived at camp each of them had already bagged a bird. Combine that with the fact that we were pretty successful fishing, and it was a pretty good weekend.
I only went fishing on four short trips (about an hour to an hour and a half during the mornings and afternoons each of Friday and Saturday). I caught two brook trout on Friday. The first was at the Little Paint site, but way towards the back of the path along a rock ledge. The second one I caught in the afternoon when we drove to a spot on Big Paint. It seemed to be a pretty good sized one. I was fishing with pieces of night-crawlers. Matthew and Tyler both caught their limit of 5 trout that day, and Tyler caught 3 big brown trout. I think he said that they were 18", 17", and 15.5" in length. Those were the biggest trout I had seen caught up there. He caught them while wading in the river along the equestrian trail.
On Saturday morning I woke up around 8:40, walked down the path at Little Paint by myself to the first fishing hole around 9:15, and within 10 minutes I had caught a rainbow trout. I kept trying a few spots back there for another 45 minutes or so, but no other bites. Later on that evening I walked back to the same spot with Matthew, and I caught two more rainbow trout. So in total for my trip I caught 5 trout (3 rainbows, 2 brook). I suppose if I was really trying to fish most of the time I could have done better, but quite a bit of our time was just spent sitting around camp trying to heat up the fire to cook or just spent relaxing. It was quite relaxing just sitting around the campfire, listening to the sounds of the stream behind us, and seeing the stars at night when it was nice and clear skies.
I'm not sure how many times I have been up here fishing... maybe six or seven times. I did blog about past trips in
2014,
2013, and
2012 at least.
 |
| Here is the Harpers Ferry sign... the closest town to where our campgrounds are. |
 |
| The Little Paint campgrounds sign where we stayed. |
 |
| Matthew with a stringer of fish at Big Paint on Friday (I think that one of those was mine). |
 |
| The rainbow trout that I caught Saturday morning. |
