When Checking Your Phone While Fishing is Acceptable

The weather was perfect, fish were rising, we had the whole day to fish, and yet my mind was elsewhere. I watched from the bank as my good friend Andy lengthened his cast to cover the top of the run he was fishing. The white post from his Parachute Adams suddenly appeared in the roughest water at the head, drifted three feet, then disappeared. He set the hook and a rainbow trout rocketed out of the river, twisted in the air and crashed into the dark green water.

We were less than an hour into our day on the upper Sacramento River and the fishing seemed to be as good as we hoped. It was the beginning of May and for the previous month, we’d watched water flows, air temperatures and weather forecasts, waiting for the first to drop, the second to rise and the latter to show clouds. Finally, they aligned – on a weekend, at that – and the combination of conditions yielded our prediction of a great spring baetis hatch. Bugs were hatching, fish were happy and we didn’t even have to play hooky.

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This story was written for Trout Unlimited’s Priority Waters program and is based on a handful of trips made to the Upper Sac when I lived in Ashland. The video below is a moment from one such trip when the bugs were really going.