Friday, October 30th, I was entertaining customers in Paradise Utah. I flew in from Phoenix on Thursday evening and instead of driving home and having to leave very early Friday morning I drove to Brigham City and spent the evening in the new Hampton Inn. I would have stayed in Logan but couldn't get a decent hotel room.
Friday morning I was in the car at 8 to drive to the White's Ranch in Paradise. Winter is not far away, there was ice on the windshield. I took the back road from Wellsville the last 3 miles of which was dirt with steep drop offs. The Cache Valley was covered with fog as I got off highway 91 and headed east. The leaves in Logan are a few weeks ahead of the leaves in Utah Valley and everything was yellow and red. Very pretty!
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| morning fog in the Cache Valley, winter is not far away |
This trip was set up by Braden Henrie who is the sales rep for Winfield in Utah. We invited 2 PMP companies, a dairy supply company from Burley Idaho that sells Zyrox fly bait, and Dean Hill retired manager from Univar. Braden, Dean, and the 2 PMP's went pheasant hunting for released birds (not sure how sporting that is). The rest of us went fly fishing along the Little Bear River that flows through the ranch. It was about 35 degrees when we started but by 10 am it was near 50 and quite comfortable.
We started off using dry flies but got no bites. Then we attached a wet fly to the dry fly and I caught one small trout. Then we switched to artificial blood worms and I quickly hooked 6 fish and landed three of them. We were using barbless hooks so we could easily release what we had caught,
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| You can see the trout in the water |
Near noon we moved up the river to a spot below some falls where you could see dozens of fish in the water. I would dangle the worm in front of the fish and they would just ignore it but I finally landed a pretty good sized fish.
Then my last catch of the day was about a 4 pound, 20 inch fish that put up a real good fight. It was gratifying. I don't get to go fishing very often so it was great to go fishing as part of my job.
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| ElRay, Mike Miller (our guide) and the biggest catch of the day |
