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Day 1
We woke up at White Sulphur Springs Hot Springs. The night before, the lady working the front desk said that the breakfast truck in the parking lot opened at 6 a. m. and had great breakfast burritos. She was right … We ordered four hangover breakfast burritos, and drove to Camp Baker put in.
Another group was getting ready, but they had a full size raft and the CFS was at 100. They told us they had planned on camping at Scotty Allen at mile 12, but after paddling 15 miles the first day in a lightweight kayak, I have to assume they didn’ t get that far. We filled out the selfregistration form and filled our kayaks with camera gear and fishing stuff.
Jake put bananas in my boat … so I added a sticker to the front of my kayak, and hid them back in his. We were pumped to fish so we stopped way too much on the upper section. Paul caught a couple fish on a JJ Special, and I missed a few on Smoke-n-Mirrors, but it was slow. After two miles, we realized we had a long way to go in shallow, slow water, so we spent the next few hours paddling. I got Jake back for the bananas by taking a shower at Indian Springs; I had forgot my bathing suit. Once we got to Rock Creek, we began noticing quite a few October caddis coming off. I switched to an amber colored Chubby Chernobyl and caught about a 14” brown. We made a few short stops on our way down to Syringa at mile 15. We hooked up with quite a few fish willing to eat October Caddis.
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