I was only able to go for one night at Bing. When I arrived a very good fisher had been skunked for a whole day of fishing! Imagine paying to fish and getting skunked. Well, I can well imagine because it happened to me at CB last year and that was for 2 1/2 days!
Earlier at CB there was a party of 6 fishers and they had only landed 6 fish over three days. This recent group did much better. One fellow had caught a six pounder and a four pound Rainbow.
This is a hint that the fishing in our area, even on private water which we know has adequate numbers, has something negative going on. The last three years we had drought and this year we had too much rainfall. This is not Climate Change but Climate Variety which may be the same thing and maybe responsible for making the trout grumpy.
At Bing the trout (mainly Rainbows with some Brookies) are mostly in the center of the lake. This is fairly common in lakes with pan fish hogging the shoreline. It may be that the pan fish and smaller minnows are eating all the shore food so the pickings are scarce. Obviously, the larger trout will hunt for minnows and pan fish along the shoreline but they may be doing that more at night than when we are fishing.
Normally in monoculture lakes (one species), casting to shore and retrieving is a staple method of flyfishing. Some of the fellows were doing this and catching. Of course, you would end up catching a lot of bluegill which is most annoying.
This girl above was caught casting a Grey Adams with my 3wt to the center of the lake over 80 ft of water! There must be something of interest coming up from the bottom to have them there.
All in all, I landed nine fish, lost two in 1 1/2 days of fishing, half on the dry fly, the very best way to fly fish. The Black Coney Leech was my best wet fly. Most of the other people were catching on black leech patterns. Leeches are a desirable and easy food in the fall as trout bulk up for the winter.
BTW, the Minky below did not catch a fish. Back to the drawing board for that one!