Carmen and I went camping in the Eastern Sierras this weekend trying to find a tiny creek that we fished a couple of years back that was filled with Golden Trout. Well...we found it. 

Click in images to enlarge

The fishing started out really tough with the fish extremely spooky. The creek is very small (a foot wide in some places) and the wind was gusting.

Trying to get a fly to a small target in the wind proved quite a challenge. Eventually we found that longer casts to the deeper pools in between gusts was the magic we needed and thereafter we started catching these beauts at will.

You'll notice a size 20 Para-RAB and a similar size Mirage. Both worked equally well.

I had a question for you after observing some of these Golden's behaviour. Many of them displayed signs of either spawning or getting ready to spawn and one in particular looked like it was hovering over a specific spot on a gravel bed and fanning eggs.

I always thought that trout spawned and then left the redd. Am I correct in this assumption or do they hang around and protect the eggs? I also saw that the creek flowed pretty slowly, so maybe the oxygen content was lower and the parent needed to fan the eggs to increase the oxygen.

(The Golden Trout is a threatened sub-species of rainbow trout found in California in tributaries of the Kern River.  I would be a little surprised at them breeding in May, but perhaps someone can throw more light on this.)