Not the best fall fishing I ever had...

I departed right after I posted the other day. Stopped in Oxford and picked up groceries and headed over to NH. Going through Grafton Notch I hit low clouds and rain, the tops of the mountains were in the soup so I didn't shoot any pics there. Arrived at John's camp to find it locked, the next door neighbor was supposed to open it up. So I left the cooler full of food on the back deck and headed over to the Androscoggin. I first stopped at the Gage House pool and chatted up a nice old dood who was in the process of climbing out of his suit and into his waders. Turned out he had deployed to Vietnam in the late 1960's as an AW2 with VP-11. I finally left him to the gage house and drove around to the other side of the river to fish. Suited up and walked down to the river. 

Three casts and I had a nice rainbow about 12" or so. Here's a shot of the water:

The wind was trying to be a total pain in the ass and it was scattered showers just to keep things interesting. Here's the VP-11 dood working his way down the other side

He was throwing a weighted nymph and taking fish fairly regularly. 

About 5:30 or so the sun dropped below the trees and the fish shut right off. I had caught about a dozen fish, all but two of them were rainbows, with the largest about 14-15". The other two fish were landlocked salmon. Not bad for a short afternoon of dry fly fishing. 

So I headed back to camp and it was unlocked so I unloaded and put the food away. I read a book and dozed while sipping an Oaked Arrogant Bastard until John arrived about 8PM. We made some grub, drank beer and listened to the winds howling outside. It didn't bode well for Saturday. 

Saturday morning when we got up we had gale force winds. So after a nice breakfast of sausage and eggs I helped John put 5 bundles of roofing down on his garage. Once that was done we packed a lunch and drove over to Pittsburg, NH to see what was going on with the Upper Connecticut River; we were especially interested in looking over the so-called trophy sections between the lakes. Here's a few shots of that area.

here's where the river dumps into Lake Francis

and a shot down the lake

The lake is low because they drain them every fall to make it easier to manage the winter precipitation

The wind was howling and every place we stopped and looked the good pools were full of fishermen so we decided to take a different route back to Colebrook. Along the way I shot this tractor pr0n. That's quite a collection!

We walked in where I had fished the day before and fished for about 2 hours. I caught one rainbow 10-12" and lost another bigger fish. John didn't catch a thing. So we headed back to camp, made a bunch of hot wings and drank beer while we watched the Big Lebowski, that being a kind of a ritual for these trips. 

This morning it was bitter, 28 when I got out of bed. So we ate breakfast and I packed up. On the way out I stopped and fished the gage house pool for about an hour, no fish were moving and when the winds came up I said the heck with it and headed for home. On the way back I shot this pic of Grafton Notch.

As always you can click to embiggen the pics...