The King in His Chair

Left on Thursday to go trout fishing with Joe, John hurt his back and could not make the trip. The weather has been terrible for the last 3 weeks, rain and very cold temperatures and today was no different. We lost our fishing location in Grayling because politics and special interest groups changed the way we could fish the river. We decided to give the Pine River in Lake County a try this year. When we pulled into camp the river was very high and very dirty. We talked to a local owner of a trout fly shop and she told us that the river is 5 times higher than it's normal height. We thought about going to a different river to fish but it was getting late in the day and raining pretty hard so we just set up camp and thought we would try fishing here anyways. Fishing on Saturday was terrible, high and dirty water on the Little Manistee and the Pine. We only had one bite for the whole day. This was the first time in 32 years we did not have a trout dinner on opening day. We were sitting around the camp on Saturday evening and lo and behold John pulled up. Not sure how he found us but we were glad he made it. The three of us fished the Little Manistee on Sunday morning with no fish caught. Finally on Sunday afternoon we started to catch some fish on the Pine River. By this time the water had dropped 3 feet on the Pine River but the water was still dirty. By Monday morning the Pine River was fish able and we picked up a few more fish so we had our trout dinner. We had to learn a different way of trout fishing than the way we are accustomed to. But as the saying goes, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". We kept 10 trout for the trip, 9 brown trout and 1 rainbow trout. We have a new Trout King this year. John caught a 16 1/2 inch brown trout to win that title. Go figure, he shows up late with a bad back, leaves early because of a meeting and then he catches the largest fish. We all had a good time and the trip turned out better than we thought it would.