My Mom was supposed to meet us at Sonora Bridge CG that night so I stopped in to see if she was there before heading into Bridgeport. As we drove past the first campsite a lady flagged us down. Before I could say a thing, she told us where my Mom was camped, that she had already paid and to be aware of the bears because 3 had been seen there that week. She asked how our trip had been so far and half a dozen other questions. I figured she was the camp host, being a little over friendly, but later found out she wasn’t. Almost every time we drove by after that it was all the gossip you could (n)ever want to know. She was pleasant, but obviously a bored busybody.
Mom accompanied us into Bridgeport. While I took care of the laundry, they checked out the shops and I checked out a rather HOT brunette that came in and did some wash. Half-heartedly made some small talk, but it wasn’t going to go anywhere. It probably didn’t help that I’m 41 and she might have been 30 on the high end. After the laundry was done I met Mom and Jeff at Ken’s Sporting goods and Mom got Jeff a Jr. Hunting license as a late B-day present.
Back at camp, dinner that night was BBQ’d Chicken w/ all the fixings. Good Stuff! We BBQ’d them on a propane Hibachi type grill that leaked grease out of the bottom all over the table. We cleaned it up as well as we could but, about 3AM I awoke to find a smallish thin Bear polishing the painted picnic table with his tongue. It didn’t bother anything else or even harm the table, which kind of surprised me.
Wednesday AM I couldn’t get Jeff to wake up early for the hike into a pig factory I wanted to do. So instead of hiking at gray-light like I wanted to we headed to the EW at about 9:30. Arriving at ~10:15, the water was very clear and the fish were spooky. I managed 2 hits but spent most of my time trying to get Jeff into a fish. It was tough to say the least. He hooked up twice by ~3:00, but both were lost. We’d worked about a mile of water and Jeff wanted to go somewhere else or go back to camp. I told him lets drive to another area of the same river.
In a prime Big fish spot I swung an Articulated Sex Dungeon streamer. On my 3rd swing, I was stripping it back when it was Annihilated! Line shot through my hands so fast it hurt. A coil of line wrapped around the back of the rod. POW!! The 1X tippet shattered. Jeff looked at me like he was dumbfounded then whispered “That was HUGE wasn’t it?” He had been playing in some slack water, but he immediately picked up the other flyrod, a 3wt, and asked for a streamer. I thought about telling him how undergunned it was for this spot, but instead I gave him a Cone head bugger that it could barely handle. We flogged the water for another 1:30 for nothing. I really wish he had hooked one.
On the way back to camp we talked about the hike tomorrow and that it’d be ok for him to take his rifle. I told him about the Bacon wrapped Pepper and Cheese stuffed Rabbit my Dad used to make and when we should leave.
To be continued