Antietam, 04/02/25

I had a great couple of hours fishing with two amazing people. Gary Leone is now going to be guiding for Precision so he wanted to pick my brain. Gary already knows his stuff, it was just to watch me a little and questions like, equipment prep., lunches little stuff like that. So, I figured I was going to invite Kristen whom I taught how to fly fish and now for her it is, “here is the stream” fish and she will catch. Kristen has become a best friend of Tracy and I. So. I was my pleasure to treat her to this. We fished from 9:30AM until 2:30PM. It was cloudy and 40 to 55 degrees. The wind set in around 1PM and you could feel the change coming. The water was low, 43 and plenty of craneflies making for a few rising trout. They both Euro nymphed and I took my Avantt II with nymphs and an indicator for a walk. We fished on my very lower section. It has some rainbows and with the cold water temperatures, I figured they’d be more active than the browns until the water warmed up. I don’t think those two were in the water for 15 minutes and had trout to the net. Gary picked up three and was happy and wanted to walk the stream. Lord knows how many Kristen had. I felt like 2024 steelhead again. Land 1, moments later net back in play. I landed a nice rainbow and a small brown, Gary landed 3 more. All the rainbows were over 15 inches. Kristen was playing a last chance game and got into what looked to be a hell of a brown trout in my midstream section. Gary and I thought it was a perfect set and had no clue why it got off. Seeing a 12’ Contact II bent in half and trout is still rolling the bottom, Yeah big. We all had a great time! Amazing water and still dates open for the year.