Post by gui on Sept 15, 2020 17:34:27 GMT -6
I should have actually counted them, because it may have been in the triple digits over two days of fishing.
With the girls out of town visiting family, I took the opportunity to make it to the park last weekend and fish hard on Saturday and Sunday.
The water was still fairly high and off color due to recent rains. Not the best conditions and a bit too hot still, but yet, it was a great trip.
I fished the Spillway both days, making my way up from the Beaver Lodge Nature trail to the first big pool below the dam and back down.
I was using a two nymph rig on the euro leader for the most part. This time trying to make an effort and force myself to change fly weights and tippet lengths to match conditions more often than I usually do. This "eats" a lot more tippet!
As mentioned, creek chubs were a bit of a problem.
Countless times they would jump on my flies as soon as they hit the water, without even leaving them a chance to drift into the prime lies.
Several times I would also feel a somewhat heavier weight and get excited.
But then the weight rapidly gave in and I was pulling two wiggly little bananas off the water. Ha, the double chub...
But sometimes, it did materialize into a nice surprise.
And if I need to catch 99 chubs to get a LMF brown, I want to catch more chubs!
Other nice surprises included when the wiggles felt more spirited than usual, and closer inspection revealed little silver bullets with some cool markings.
Of the 20-25 trout that I caught this weekend, these little guys accounted for maybe half of them. Pretty awesome.
Also, the fighting spirit and the good looks on this one made me think that she may have been one of their big sisters from a previous spawn.
Saturday morning was the most productive.
During the steamy hours of the day, I was catching mostly chubs but also ran into the resident otter family mid Spillway.
That's the first time that I actually see them, and I counted at least five. They were having a lot of fun going up and floating down the rapids and playing with each other just like kids. Quite a sighting!
Cute creatures, but I can't help but have some mixed feelings about them... Hopefully they eat more chubs than trout!
Later I saw them much further downstream, in the first round of big Spillway pools. So they move up and down river quite a lot.
Not the highest resolution, but these are four otter heads popping off the water in the picture below.
Later on as the day went by and it cooled off a little more, I caught 99 more chubs but this stunner wasn't one
.
I think that I'm seeing a trend where the LMF browns that live in deep pools have red dots and a lighter "clay" color, while the ones that live in faster and shallower runs are more golden with big black white circled dots. But maybe I'm wrong... Anyway, always a treat!
That was the second of the two browns that I caught on this trip.
Sunday was slower. But this may have had to do with the fact that I started later in the morning and left earlier by 5PM.
Besides chubs, I caught a few rainbows here and there, including some of the little baby bows.
As I was walking down the Spillway back to my car, I was thinking about what FlyAndStream said about cutting off the dropper and tying on a streamer on the euro leader.
"You may be surprised"
So I did just that, with a big black woolly.
In my first years of fly fishing, I was essentially fishing woolly buggers on a floating line all the time. And I have probably spent more hours with a woolly than with any other type of flies. Yet, I had never tried them on the euro leader. Right away I was shocked by how fast a conehead bugger actually sinks on this setup. Also, it is pretty surprising how far you can swing the thing out with just a flick of the wrist and holding some slack line in your reel hand.
I was experimenting with different retrieves in one of the big pools and starting to get a good feel with the "drift and pulse" thing. And then BAM, big take!
Shit, that thing works!
She took me for a ride, but the 6X held on and the reel did its thing when needed.
I did not get an exact measurement, but based on where she started and ended when flat on my net, I think that the good old bow was reaching the 20" mark or close.
Maybe not my PB rainbow, but definitely my PB on the euro rod!
Cheers!
Gui
With the girls out of town visiting family, I took the opportunity to make it to the park last weekend and fish hard on Saturday and Sunday.
The water was still fairly high and off color due to recent rains. Not the best conditions and a bit too hot still, but yet, it was a great trip.
I fished the Spillway both days, making my way up from the Beaver Lodge Nature trail to the first big pool below the dam and back down.
I was using a two nymph rig on the euro leader for the most part. This time trying to make an effort and force myself to change fly weights and tippet lengths to match conditions more often than I usually do. This "eats" a lot more tippet!
As mentioned, creek chubs were a bit of a problem.
Countless times they would jump on my flies as soon as they hit the water, without even leaving them a chance to drift into the prime lies.
Several times I would also feel a somewhat heavier weight and get excited.
But then the weight rapidly gave in and I was pulling two wiggly little bananas off the water. Ha, the double chub...
But sometimes, it did materialize into a nice surprise.
And if I need to catch 99 chubs to get a LMF brown, I want to catch more chubs!
Other nice surprises included when the wiggles felt more spirited than usual, and closer inspection revealed little silver bullets with some cool markings.
Of the 20-25 trout that I caught this weekend, these little guys accounted for maybe half of them. Pretty awesome.
Also, the fighting spirit and the good looks on this one made me think that she may have been one of their big sisters from a previous spawn.
Saturday morning was the most productive.
During the steamy hours of the day, I was catching mostly chubs but also ran into the resident otter family mid Spillway.
That's the first time that I actually see them, and I counted at least five. They were having a lot of fun going up and floating down the rapids and playing with each other just like kids. Quite a sighting!
Cute creatures, but I can't help but have some mixed feelings about them... Hopefully they eat more chubs than trout!
Later I saw them much further downstream, in the first round of big Spillway pools. So they move up and down river quite a lot.
Not the highest resolution, but these are four otter heads popping off the water in the picture below.
Later on as the day went by and it cooled off a little more, I caught 99 more chubs but this stunner wasn't one
. I think that I'm seeing a trend where the LMF browns that live in deep pools have red dots and a lighter "clay" color, while the ones that live in faster and shallower runs are more golden with big black white circled dots. But maybe I'm wrong... Anyway, always a treat!
That was the second of the two browns that I caught on this trip.
Sunday was slower. But this may have had to do with the fact that I started later in the morning and left earlier by 5PM.
Besides chubs, I caught a few rainbows here and there, including some of the little baby bows.
As I was walking down the Spillway back to my car, I was thinking about what FlyAndStream said about cutting off the dropper and tying on a streamer on the euro leader.
"You may be surprised"
So I did just that, with a big black woolly.
In my first years of fly fishing, I was essentially fishing woolly buggers on a floating line all the time. And I have probably spent more hours with a woolly than with any other type of flies. Yet, I had never tried them on the euro leader. Right away I was shocked by how fast a conehead bugger actually sinks on this setup. Also, it is pretty surprising how far you can swing the thing out with just a flick of the wrist and holding some slack line in your reel hand.
I was experimenting with different retrieves in one of the big pools and starting to get a good feel with the "drift and pulse" thing. And then BAM, big take!
Shit, that thing works!
She took me for a ride, but the 6X held on and the reel did its thing when needed.
I did not get an exact measurement, but based on where she started and ended when flat on my net, I think that the good old bow was reaching the 20" mark or close.
Maybe not my PB rainbow, but definitely my PB on the euro rod!
Cheers!
Gui
