My wife, Rosie, made a dozen or so casts to a rock-strewn run before hooking up with a stout 15-inch rainbow. Her fish shot upstream through the pool toward a couple of large boulders as guide Debbie Gillespie looked on and readied her net. Seconds later another ’bow sucked in my nymph as the current swept it through the waist-deep riffle by a large rock. It, too, took off upstream, heading toward the women until I snubbed it. The trout leaped skyward. I turned the fish and continued the battle in the smaller pool closer to my position while watching the catch and release above me. Gillespie then headed downstream to put a net under my fish, a beautiful twin of the rainbow Rosie had just caught.
Rosie and I were dry-dropper fishing with 9-foot, 5-weight fly rods most of the morning. We used a terrestrial as our dry fly and fished a single nymph or squirmy worm underneath it. According to our guide, in the summer there are lots of larva that fall into North Carolina’s Davidson River, such as inchworms, caterpillars and grubs. We added the tiniest of spilt shot in fast-current areas to keep the offering deeper in the water column.
The action in the catch-and-release section of the Davidson continued
