Casselman River, 5.23.2009 - 5.24.2009

I went on my first real outing this weekend to the Casselman River in Grantsville, MD. Because of the weather my time on the water has been very limited this year, but I hope that changes. It was a great weekend, and probably the best two days of fishing I've ever had on the Casselman. For a holiday weekend I expected it to be very crowded because it does get crowded out there, but this weekend it was strangely empty. Saturday I had the river to myself and Sunday, the few people I saw were gone by mid morning. I like being alone when I'm fishing. For me, it just helps me relax and concentrate and I always fish better alone.

The fishing was simply amazing. I pretty much stayed in the same place all weekend. It's one of my favorite spots and it was so productive I had no reason to move. I did look at a couple of other areas at the end of the first day but I didn't see much going on.

I'm not a fish counter and I'm not good at estimating size. Neither of these things matter much to me and I get annoyed when I'm with people who play the numbers game. Having said that, I would guess that for two days I caught and released well over 30 fish. That's a lot of fish for that river or for any river in this area to be honest. Some were in the 12' - 14" range, most were in the 15" to 17" range and one was well over 20", maybe 24" or 25".

For the most part, I used a handful of flies. Stimulator dries with basically one of 3 droppers; a caddis larvae, a little brown nymph that I started tying last year, or a caddis pupae. I also fished a bwo viz-a-dun for about an hour and did pretty well, but with the exception of a few fish that went for the dry flies, they were mostly caught on the droppers. Once I got the depth of the dropper dialed in, it was just crazy. I caught fish on several consecutive casts from the same run.

Like I said, it was the best two days that I've had there and two of the best days I've had period. I make no apologies for that. To me it makes up for all of the hard days that I've had to grind through, all the while dreaming of days like these. The best part is that I learned a few things while I was out there too. I'll tell you about those things sometime soon.

Tight lines.