The Blizzard of '17. Kids out at 11 p.m. on a school night, scraping a scrim of white stuff off the cars to throw snowballs. Or make miniature snowmen. Parents holding them back: "Wait an hour ... there's not quite enough snow on the ground to make a snow angel." If you squinted into a street light, you could see it coming down.
Austin got about an inch and a half. Corpus Christi got 7 inches (okay, now that's cool). New Braunfels got about 2 inches, the first the town had seen in four years.
I had a fishing trip planned, my first of the season to the Canyon Lake tailwaters fishery.
Up at 0600 for the hour-and-a-half drive south. Roads are clear, but the farther south I go the whiter it gets.
I arrive at Action Angler fly shop on the river, and meet-up with my fishing partner for the day. The fly shop operator shakes his head and grins: "Heck, I didn't think anyone would be in today." Not a bad guess ... a guide friend had a cancellation for Friday: "Too cold!" the prospective clients said. He laughed: "There are places they are shoveling 4 feet of snow out of the way just to launch a boat this winter."
With coffee in the thermos, longjohns under the waders, we're ready. We fool around with indicator rigs in some pocket water in the first couple of shallow runs. Nada.
My buddy, acting on an almost-forgotten tip from a friend, switches to a black wooly bugger. Fish on! I switch. Fish broken off!
We keep at it, leapfrogging upstream, sometimes sightcasting to big 'bows in the clear, low water. (flows were way low, about 80cfs) End up bringing five to the net, all on streamers, losing four.
Before we know it, it's lunchtime ... fish through it. Then 4 p.m. Oops, time to go!
All told, a pretty terrific day.
*Guadalupe River Trout Unlimited (I'm a grateful member) and Texas Parks & Wildlife Department both stock the tailwaters. There are holdover fish, and even some spawning in the 8-16 miles of river that stays cold enough to support salmonids. This year, the hatchery in Missouri that supplies the fish flooded and they lost most of the GRTU order. GRTU always orders a higher percentage of big fish than TPWD does, but this year the hatchery substituted a lot of brood fish. So ... in addition to the wiley holdovers, some really big, new fish in the river. Browns coming next week!