First Fat Fish 27Feb18

Surprisingly, today was my first outing fishing of 2018! Sometimes I've caught trout on Jan 2nd... today it's seven weeks later. I hit the PT on a 62° sunny day, which was awesome though others thought the same, so the river was a smidge crowded. I arrived at 10:10am and fished till 1:30pm with one fat 19.5" rainbow on a blood midge to show. I didn't see true fish action till about noon, then I fished the targets I saw deep at the 3rd weir above upstream Nature Center parking till I caught one. I did see evidence of the 'bows creating redds by finning clean sections of the riverbed but no fish were spawning on them yet. One guy I encountered said he had five nice ones but others said "none" and I saw only one other old guy land a smallish fish. Despite the sun & temps the river was cold and gin clear @ 75cfs, but the wind was up a bit to 10mph making some casts tougher. I saw a few super tiny (#26) midges hatch and small fish surface feeding "late" in the day on their spinners. It was gr8 being out again.

These are images from videos I took using my new vest-mount HeroCam. It seems to work well though I wasn't too vigorous with my wading, landing or catching in winter flows and turning the VestCam on & off on was therefore easy. Here's a video composite from the outing... I guess I give PDQVestCam results a solid A-, grading on the the curve and noting my prior schemes and lack of success... the VestCam did not snag my line, did not require my squeezed knees and immobility for filming as NetCam did, allowed me to move unencumbered, and most importantly took decent video and images of the whole event. I will write the product marketing guys at Simms as I believe a VestCam feature is worth integration in the high end vest at least as a feature. Embedding the magnetic frame in the vest would ease and improve attachment... they could OEM the PDQ and charge 5X as they usually do.