I’ve spent the last three days thrashing through Devil’s Club and Johnsongrass only to posthole through sand and silt and muck, looking for smallmouth bass and pike.  Devil’s Club is as bad as it sounds, Johnsongrass cuts at your legs.  But here the old-growth whitecedar and birch shade out everything except waist-high ostrich fern and bracken.  The river is clear, cobbled with slick round stones, every now and again a spruce sweeper digging out a deeper spot. 

I cast a big floatie without a hit, then a little Irresistable; still nothing.  I switch subsurface, without a strike. 

On a stream this pretty, it hardly matters.