Rainbow Falls Ring Search

This is how I know The Mart had a plan all along to go fishing twice last weekend. Later events would reveal that The Mart knew how loose his ring had got over the last year since he ditched 40lbs. In fact we would later learn that The Mart was specifically instructed to leave his ring at home when fishing. Sorry to call you out Bud but good work like this cannot go unsung.

I got a text Sat morning, " Lost my wedding ring last night. It may have fallen off in the truck, or it came off while we were fishing". The only logical thing to do was to go back up there and look for it. I looked over at Alica, "You wanna go fishing"?

Rigged Alicia up, threw the rods in the Jeep, came to a rolling stop in front of Marty's place, and were looking for the ring in an hour. Started retracing our steps below the falls. We looked for about 10 minutes when Marty said, "Hey Jamie you got your camera on you"? I'm not sure what kind of question that was but I replied that I did in fact have several cameras available. "We can look at the pictures from last night to see if I had my ring on". "Look at the big brain on Marty"!

That's when we discovered the evidence shown above. Time to move down the creek. Ran into a fella fighting a fish at the next run on our search. We explained what was going on during the fight and the gentleman was nice enough to let us look. We waited till he landed a nice 17" bow he had hooked but still no dice.

Next stop Cougar Lake. I wanted Alicia to get fishing so I set her up on the creek below Cougar. There is some really good water in this section that isn't fished as often as some of the other stretches. This section during a caddis hatch is just silly. Too early in the day for caddis so we switched to a small black beauty. Alicia did great!

We had run into Ben Wurster from Steel City Anglers up at RF earlier in the year and he had given Alicia a really great piece of advice for fighting fish. Alicia keeps the rod right up against her mid section with the rod tip high in the air. She never loses contact with the butt of the rod and lets the reel do all of the work. Really good advice for a beginner! Works like a champ. Alicia hooked and landed several nice bows completely by herself. Three or four trout later we decided to head to Elk Lake since our search at Cougar came up empty.

We pulled up to Elk Lake and were getting ready to fish. Marty said, "I'll just walk all along the bank here where I was last night and see if it turns up". Three steps later, "There it is". Saweet! It's a great feeling when a plan comes together. Little did Marty know of yet another, bigger plan that had been hatched even before he had hatched the ring idea.

We could concentrate on fishing now! I was getting a few bumps on a ridiculous chartreuse Meat Whistle when I looked to my right and saw a dark green back with SHOULDERS coming up the bank about 50 feet out. I told The Mart to drop the dry he was fishing with about three feet in front of him.  He got it in front of her but she just kinda shot a quick glance at it and kept coming, directly toward me. There I was holding this god awful chartreuse monstrosity of a Meat Whistle with huge dumbbell eyes and way too many legs. I was a little embarrassed actually. Not embarrassed enough though to keep me from swimming it right in front of her. I think I actually saw her pupils dilate. This thing is BRIGHT! She just opened her mouth and gulped it down like she knew she was wrong. Ha! My delicate presentation paid off!  I had the rod tip right over her head. She couldn't get an angle on me and I had her in in 30 seconds or so. Crazy!

Remember I hadn't planned on fishing twice last weekend? I really hadn't but things just worked out that way. That kinda made the plan I hatched early Friday afternoon to fish on Monday with my Folks seem a bit overkill. But what was done was done. 

I actually overbooked my guest limit to RF on Friday. Joe, Marty, and my Folks all said they were down to fish that evening. Crap! Didn't think that was going to happen. I felt like a friggin airline. The Old Man was more than cool with it and actually got a laugh out of it. We planned to hit it up on Monday evening. So I wasn't going to fish twice last weekend but had the next best thing planned.

Anyone wonder if we looked in the truck before going up Sat morning? We were wondering the same thing as soon as we got up there. I told Alicia, "because if we found it we wouldn't come up here". Alicia's mind bullet scored a direct hit. "Just kidding babe"! Or was I?