Longer days make late afternoon sneak-aways easier to come by. Fish the hour before dusk and see what happens. I wish I could better remember the ones I caught today, but thoughts of those are being pushed out by the all-consuming cinder block hook-up. The one where the rainbow with shoulders explodes upon contact with your fly, crashes back to earth like a cinder block, leaps again, falls back down and then disappears. It  left me standing in the stream with a slack line, a rushing sound in my head from the adrenaline spike, and nothing more to do but throw up my hands and cuss.

“That was a monster,” I heard the guy upstream from me yell after I lost it. I think he was secretly pleased.

The resident fox came out tonight. This is the second time I’ve seen him walking the bank this spring. He wouldn’t sit still long enough for a photo.

I stopped by the fly shop and everyone (three, all told) started talking stripers. One guy knew another guy catching schoolies at one spot, and another guy claimed he pulled out a 26-incher just the other day, and the third one said his buddy got a few on sand eel patterns. You know every bit of that is 100 percent bona fide. I’m going to restart the striper hunt next week.