Bears.... Trout fishing report Mar. 12, 2006

[Onthefly]

Been a while since I posted here. Really busy with my first child, she's 4 months now and I'm getting back into the swing of things. Here's a trip report I posted to my new forum on wnctrout.com I thought a few folks here might be interested in reading about what's happening here in the mountains.

Chad and I headed into the hills looking to fish for a few hours and ended up fishing Elk River in Banner Elk. While walking down the road past the service garage we heard some loud noises coming from the big dumpster. Chad climbed up and looked in only to see two 150# plus bears stuck in the dumpster. They looked scared, very scared in fact. I wasn't worried so much about them, **** I was scared!

We decided to head on down and fish for a while and think about what we could do to help. After fishing and catching several nice fish we decided to head back up and see what we could do to help. You know sometime people just don't have good sense. We, well I say we, Chad unlocked the rear door and swung it open. At this point I was 50 yards up the road (Chad is faster than I am so I wanted a head start!! These two bears slowly walked out, looked at us and then headed into the hills! What a great feeling, we helped the bears out and didn't get eaten!

We ended up catching our share of trout! Lots of nice trout rising to the thousands of blue wing olives that were popping off everytime the sun went behind a cloud. Again nothing fancy fly wise just some good drifts. Not sure how many fish we landed but got to free two bears, saw an otter, and a mink. Lots of birds working the bugs and the best part of the trip..... didn't see another angler.

Anyone else out enjoying this weather??