The “Purple Mountains Majesty” missed my subdivision by a wide swath, but Getting Bit is just that, throw a fly in anger and hope that you get something with fins that’s receptive.

This is what I got to work with and I’m approaching it with both caution and optimism.

Caution because with any stream in the rural-urban interface, you’re as likely to find a corpse as you are to find a pristine riffle of hungry steelhead. Both are equally remote, but you just never know.

Optimism, because I saw about 60 salmon here a couple of winters ago. Anything that can support a run of salmon can support something that bites flies year round.

This is your typical effluent enriched central valley farm creek. Access is spotty, but in casing what’s here I have managed to scare up carp, black bass, suckers, a couple of lawnmowers, and a chest of drawers. Gravity got the better of the drawers.

Mid-August means the water is at it’s lowest, allowing me to see where the deep channels are, where the source of the dirty water is, and avoid the ambushes from the EPB (Eat Paintball, Biatch) guerrillas that live in the cane breaks all weekend.

The source of the dirty water was easy to find. It had been diverted through a  half dozen farms and a horse stable, so getting above that was the first step.

Midday is a poor time to inventory bug life, but it was what I had. I scanned the bridge abutments and any spider webs that I came across, to no effect. Saw the prerequisite damselflies and dragonflies buzzing about, but checking the underbrush yielded nothing.

Not wearing waders limited my access to underwater objects; a cursory check of submerged rocks and sticks revealed snails, minnows, and tadpoles. I found a wing from something in a web, but couldn’t tell whether it was a caddis or a termite.

Someone had been there before me – another optimist. Found two discarded hook packages (snelled #8), one worm container, and half a clam shell. The clam shell would have been used for catfish or carp, the #8 hooks were consistent with the clam-as-bait theory.

Given the spent paintball rounds I saw, I might have been tempted to slide a red one on that #8 hook, even if I missed the strike – it’s likely that fish would’ve farted crimson for a week or two.

None of this is my idea, it is part of the perils of the Internet. Reading blogs like The Urban Flyfisher and Carp on the Fly is the fishing equivalent of luring underage school children across state lines.

With a two week vacation looming on the horizon, I will be returning with the appropriate armaments; crossed bandoliers of chilled beverage, and  a flyrod. At minimum, I will piss off the folks driving to work on the bridge above…

So what’ve you got in your backyard, Mister?

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