Saturday April 27th 2011. We fished a body of water under the broken nose of an old man and we caught an awful lot of very large brookies. It was our first trip since Oscar died. Oscar was our dog of 12 years. We think he had a word with the fish gods because they threw us a really big bone this time. Everything was down deep on bead head nymphs and streamers. It was cold and at times it was wet but it was great early season fishing. A couple of these fish looked to be around 5 pounds.

Ice out was about a week ago so we froze our ... it was jolly cold in the water.


This is one of the 5 pounders I caught. One was a big male with a deep belly and the other was a longer female.

You can just about see the fly ... a smallish bead head nymph with a little red on it. Ethan tied it the night before. The fish were all stockers probably put in right after ice out.

One of the smaller males.

I (Ethan) spent the fall of 2010 as a conservation intern out west ... and I don't mean around Worcester. Of course, when I was not working like a slave I did a little fishing. Here is a sampling. The first picture is a Saturday morning on the San Juan river near Navajo Dam in New Mexico ... a magnificent and world famous tail water that is choc full of trout that get carpet bombed on the weekends.

Here is a picture of Profile Lake in Franconia, NH ... I'm kidding, this is Colorado.

Here is a clip of me catching a 15 inch brown on the San Juan. I caught this fish on a double nymph rig. The fish went for a small zebra nymph on the bottom. Next time I go I plan to take a camera crew with me because I nearly released the camera instead of the fish.

It is January of 2011 and the lakes of New Hampshire are frozen over and ice out isn't for months. I took the dog hiking along the Pemi and found some really nice looking water. A couple of years ago I pulled a sleepy brookie out of the river in February who took my woolly bugger on the first look.