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Blue Line Surprise By Michael Richardson It was mid-March, but the temperature was twenty-six degrees. I was hiking up a trail with roughly twelve inches of snow. The only reprieve I had from the crunching and breaking through crust covered surface was when I hit the spaces that snowmobiles or ATV’s had travelled earlier in the week. I hiked way up into the mountains to see what gems I could find. I took my little hybrid tenkara/fly rod with me. I custom designed this rod only a few weeks prior and was hoping to get in some quality testing time, so you can imagine I was excited to put it to use on some native brook trout. Up until this point I had only landed 8 or 9 brook trout with it, so I was hoping to add a lot more to that number today.
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The walk in was very tiresome and noisy. It was killing my zen that is wintertime brookie fishing. The air was crisp, but my efforts soon gave me a chill of sweat. I stopped to catch my breath and take in my surroundings. It is often too easy to miss these sights if you are in too much of a hurry to fish. So here we are, roughly a mile and a half from civilization with a decent walk ahead of us yet. I am at the base of a hollow with a nice stand of hemlocks and rows of mountain laurel underneath them. I can hear the stream in the distance and started seeing the tops of mountain laurel. My heart wanted to flutter, but I did not allow any diversion from my game plan. I knew that I wanted to see some
