Online angling research has a way of spurring on preparations that have been back-burnered for some time. Well behind the curve in my annual fly-tying efforts, I found the motivation I required to catch up on the usual off-season work at the vise over the past week following a storm which cooped me up inside the cabin last Saturday and relegated my outdoors efforts to some screen time. Through my scouring of the internet and curiosity as to recent stockings, I identified a small stream that had been filled with brook trout over the past couple of seasons. Prior to the early morning Google search, it had evaded my detection in the past and might well be worth a try in the near future. Some follow up outreach to the DNR office in the area and a return call from one of the area’s fisheries agents revealed that not only had the small flow with nearly a mile of public shoreline preserved in an Aquatic Management Area been recently stocked with the fish, they had apparently been there for several decades, with good populations and specimens up to 11 inches present in the agency’s survey’s. He requested that I report back with what I might catch this spring, as he hadn’t heard much from anglers on the creek.

With the promise that I would, a sudden urgency fell over me as I hung up the phone after the post-weekend phone call and located the fly boxes in the pouches of my gray-green fishing vest hanging in the garage. As was expected from a couple seasons of fishing, there were significant holes in the selections I had tied up, and a jumble of tangled flies had accumulated in each bottom corner of the box, having jostled loose from the foam through the process of packing, transporting, and fishing with the vest. It was then I recalled a fly box in my office that was practically brand new, decorated on its outside with the pattern of a brook trout, and inside completely empty, save for the strips of gray foam that just begged to be filled with new flies. The organization of the old box could wait, as this container suddenly took on the role of being dedicated to those flies I felt would do well on this tiny stream, which in my mind grew more and more appealing with the imagined brookies I would certainly catch on the flies that would soon fill each side of the case.

I plowed through the easy flies first. The pheasant tail Shwapf filled the first line with its simple fold-over wing covering up an underbody of peacock or krystal flash. Next, EZ nymphs both subtle and flashy came together. Before I knew it, I was through the standard pheasant tail nymphs and into the curved wire-bodied variants in favorite colors like black, red and green. From there, I tied in small Antron wings to imitate emerging variants of the classic pattern. Then I finished off the first page with a variety of caddis pupa imitators, all sporting that light green trigger color in one way or another.

I averaged a dozen flies a day, and by the time the weekend ended, a full 70 packed the foam inserts on the right side of the open box. I recalled successes for trout of all species with each of the options and leaned first into the brook trout I had caught on the small streams of South Dakota’s Black Hills with those easy fishing Shwapfs. Then I harkened back to my days in the steep drops of Camden State Park chasing brown trout with those curved emergers in a flow that looked more like the north shore of Minnesota than the southwestern prairie region that it ran through. Finally, my mental fishing trip took me up to Lake Superior, fishing rainbows in the Baptism River with those green caddis nymphs.

It was my hope as the memories all blurred together that the completed page I had filled during the week, and the one I hoped to complete in the seven days to come would combine to give me the options to add pages to my memory book as well on a stream yet to be explor