HNFI First Flight, Beat 2...Third Session

I realized yesterday that I forgot to finish this adventure.  Between the catching up on fly orders, emails and another bout of diverticulitis, I have been swamped.  Enough said.

Quick recap....bad news at work equaled disaster on the water for me.  Lost four fish in beat 6 while fishing the last flight.  Greg, whom all thought would be the handicap, was carrying the team.  Boy was I having a poor showing at this competition.  We were ranked 11 out of 16 teams... but at least we weren't last!  We were due to fish beat 2 from 0830 to 1030 Saturday morning.  The last session for the competition before the championship round.  A reminder, beat two looked like this:

The competition called for us to fish one beat as a two fly session.  That meant that we could only use two flies, one for each of us, and if we lost them, we were done.  Greg and I had decided to fish this last session as our two fly.  We had discussed this on Thursday and decided this would be the best course of action.  This beat is a hard one to work with fast, pocket water and a lot of rocks.  We knew we were going to have to go down for the fish anyways, so we decided to call this one our two fly and use Bead Head Pheasant Tail and Bead Head Hare's Ear nymphs.  This was it.  Our last shot at getting into the championship round.  

The day dawned early for us.  Well I say early as it was like 0600 when we got up.  Damn I hate that hour of the morning.  Everyone grabbed a cup of coffee and had some breakfast.  Time ticked by both slowly and at a rapid rate.  I was nervous.  My performance had been less than stellar up to this point.  I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to succeed.  Why?  It is only fishing right?  Well I am a Type A personality.  Thus, I am constantly in competition with at least myself and I hate to lose.  I really do.  That is not to say that I am a poor loser or bad sport.  Not at all.  I just get down on myself and beat myself up when I lose.  So as time marched on, we geared up.  Here is Andy, Greg and Paul getting ready for the session.

And here I am tying my fly on and getting ready.

So with 0830 on the clock, the fishing commenced.  I won't leave you in suspense or drag it out....Greg saved the day again.  I got a big old 0.  Nada, nothing, zip.  I didn't even get a strike.  On the plus side, I didn't lose my fly either.  Greg managed to land one rainbow and was lucky enough to do so while the camera was rolling.  Nice timing.

At 1030, the judge called it quits and our first ever fly fishing competition was in the books.  We knew we weren't going to make the championship round.  Despite that, we had a blast trying.  It was a great experience and we learned a lot.  I look forward to trying again next year and am already buying items to improve the overall standing of team J&M Flies.

The fishing photos

What to do, what to do with the rest of the time we had until the awards ceremony?  Hey, let's go chase the green trout!  Coming up next, see what we caught in the afternoon (I promise I won't make you wait forever).