Heating Up....

  Hello all and thanks for checking in at the O’Grady Flyfishing Adventures. With the incredibly warm weather we have been experiencing over the last week I can’t help but think something good is going to happen. Why is that you ask? I grew up in Omaha and even though I have heard stories of cold winters elsewhere, I personally think the O may be the coldest place in the world. My first five winters in Colorado were spent in Frasier(the Icebox of the nation) and Tabernash(even colder), but even the super low temps never felt as cold as Omaha. As our readers know I have always been a huge Husker fan and so much so that I spend as much time following recruiting as the games themselves. When I was really young the Huskers went back to back, but as I grew into a serious Husker fan, my team began to become the team that couldn’t win the big one. Year after year it was an 11-1 or a 10-2 record and the recruiting was getting more and more difficult. Bringing kids from Florida and Texas to Omaha in December and January and trying to sell them on the Huskers was hard to do. In the early nineties we had a Bradenton Florida QB by the name of Tommie Frazier make his trip in January. All the recruiting experts had Tommie becoming a Golden Domer but the trip to the Husker holy land was perfect that year. See that January temps were actually getting into the lower 60’s, unheard of in Huskerland. So Tommie, after already having his chilly recruiting trip to Notre Dame was surprised to see how awesome the temps were, It was nothing at all like what he had been warned about. So as the trip was concluding he asked the coaches, is the weather always this nice in Nebraska. Now somehow the coaches looked Tommie in the eye and said “absolutely”, and that is the story how one warming trend changed the course of Husker football history.

  Now I know the ski areas in Colorado are saddened this year but after getting back into my shorts this week I sure don’t miss winter. My guess is that in a couple of weeks we will be crying for winter to end and opening our facebook page we will see the snowman effigy titled “Die Winter Die”. I was looking back at years past and wanted to get an idea as to when the fish really start to get moving again in the spring. Over the years I always tend to think it is earlier than it really has been. A look at last year and the first day that I really saw fish moving was the 25^th of February, yep that will make we want to go back to sleep for two weeks. So today I went out see how the warmth has affected the river. The fish really haven’t been affected that much. I watched quite a few fish lying in shallow slow water not doing much of anything and saw a few fish feeding in slow deeper runs. I hooked a few in the shallow water but didn’t get any fair ones to the net. Landed a couple of 16inchers in deeper pools, but I really didn’t see significant differences from even last week. The next week still looks to be mostly warm and it has to get the fish moving somehow. Unfortunately this year the last weekend before NSD was really cold in Huskerland so no tales could be told so the “good” things I’m expecting might just be the incredible feeling of fishing in February in short sleeves and not shivering to death. As always, Connell, Cat, Winston, the number”15”, and The drift Fly Shop want to thank you for reading…..