With wife and 7 yr old gone on a family and friends trip to LA, I have some time on my hands and therefore went fishing. I did fish a few weeks back on the Llano River, but just never got around to blogging about it. The Llano trip didn’t have any of my normal award winning (ha) photos since I wore a lanyard and didn’t have a place to put my iPhone.
I started out today with grand thoughts of an all day trip to some remote hill country stream but that soon disappeared with the last glimpse of civilized temperatures mid morning. Instead, I decided to trek up to Round Rock to see the Living Waters Fly Shop and see what waters they would suggest.
I got there around 1:00p. It was already about 102 outside. Chris, the owner, said that I should just run behind the shop and try out Brushy Creek. I had never been there so I gave it a shot. I picked up a few flies including my first ever moth fly. It was a little white fuzzy fly with black eyes. Chris told me to start with a little hopper first to see if they were coming to the surface.
I left the shop, took a right and followed the road about .75 miles to the first crossing. There was a convenient pull off past the bridge that I carefully guided my wife’s Mini into and parked. The creek was behind a neighborhood. It reminded me of the creeks that I used to play on when I was a kid. Probably only 2 feet high at the deepest but absolutely filled with fish. I had hoped to pick up some wading sandals at the fly shop, but Chris convinced me that I should just use my standard wading boots. Therefore, I only had some flip flops on. These were far from ideal for slopping around in a sliming creek. Lack of appropriate footwear kept me confined to about a 15 foot area. I spent about an hour in those 15 feet having a blast sight casting to little fish with my Sage 5 wt. I only landed one as the majority of the takers weren’t much bigger than my hopper. The one unlucky fish was a large panfish that had a perch body and a bass mouth. I’ll have to look up what it was.
After the strong urge to move upstream but equally strong counter urge to not walk around on the slippery rocks in my flip flops won out, I decided to head home. Probably not going to be high on my return visit list but it was nice and convenient so a possibility if I’m in the North part of Austin.
On another note, I used my Water Walker Lanyard that Rick made for me. I haven’t posted a review yet and I apologize sincerely for that. The lanyard is based on the Southwestern model. You can look at the pictures on his site but they don’t do it justice. The workmanship is top notch and they are honestly really good looking. I’ve seen lanyards in stores and picked them up and thought that they were overpriced for a piece of string that runs around your neck, but Rick’s look like they cost an awful lot more than the prices on his site. The connectors are all top notch and it’s so comfortable that you forget it’s on. I’ll take some pictures of it close up tomorrow but in the meantime, here’s one of the lanyard on me at Brushy Creek.
