1/2-1/3/10
Written by Nick Cassidy
I spoke with my friend Rob the other day and we decided to make plans to head to the moutains for a night of camping and two days of fishing. Neither of us had looked at the weather forecast, and once we did we both were waiting for the other to call and wimp out. The temperatures were supposed to get down into the low teens at night and a high in the upper 20s. Since we were both too proud to cancel the trip we arrived at the Chattooga River at 11:00am on Jan. 2nd and started the two mile hike in.
All of the puddles were frozen over and the wind was biting. We made it back to a nice campsite, threw our gear down and hit the stream. No fish were caught in the first few hours as they showed no interest in our wooly buggers and most of our time was spent breaking the ice of our fly rods, messing with line tangles due to high winds, and heading back to warm by the fire. We got a fire going and started to rotisserie a rabbit that I had shot in Michigan. We went down to the river again and this time tied some dropper nymphs off the bugger and added an indicator. I ended up landing a small rainbow on the nymph and then headed back to the fire to turn the rabbit and warm up.
This would be the process for the next several hours as we could only fish for about an hour at a time before our hands and feet were frozen. We took a long break to eat the rabbit and then hiked a few hundred yards upstream where Rob caught 3 nice rainbows (the biggest around 14) and I landed a beautiful 14″ brown, all on #18 lighting bugs. We headed back to camp and got the fire blazing, cooked some venison steaks and then stayed close to the fire until we crawled into our cold sleeping bags around 10pm. Andrea said the windchill was down to 7 in Cumming, so I have to imagine that it was near 0 up there.
When we woke up in the morning our drinking water was frozen solid and so were our wading boots…we actually had to put them on in the river to soften them up. After fishing for a few minutes we decided to pack up our gear and hike out. The hike thawed us out a bit, but I ran into one more problem when we made it to the truck. The laces on my wading boots were frozen so solid that I could not get my boots off. I will share with you later my survival trick for getting off frozen boots…not pretty but effective. This was definitely an adventerous trip. The fishing wasn’t great, but it is was fun nonetheless. Plus, since I made it out I got to post the first fishing report of 2010.
Looking at the rabbit roasting picture, I’m reminded of a line from the movie Jeremiah Johnson said by Will Geer: “You cook good rabbit pilgrim”.
From the story it appears that it was a frigid two days.
Does this represent how you got those frozen boots off?
As for getting the wading boots off…I did what I had to do!! They are waders and wading boots and can be washed off anyways.
The roasted rabbit was some of the best campfire fare I have had. We sprinkled it with some spices and just tore off the meet after about 2 hours of cooking and it was delicious. I do cook some good rabbit.