2010’s adventure to trout paradise, day two
Published on August 10th, 2010 by Rodney
Day two!
This morning the knocks on the door started at 8:30am again. Carlo and Shane greeted my sleepy eyes. I told them to get a head start. Nina and I took our time and didn’t reach the river until 11am. What’s the hurry? There are lots of unfished spots anyway. We pulled up to where their truck was parked and radioed them to find out where they were. They told us that they went upstream, so we decided to go downstream.
The first couple of spots were a bit shallow but should still hold some fish. After gaining no attention with my dry fly, I decided to switch up to a nymph. It took two casts to trick a nice fish that was resting in 2ft of water. Afterward, we continued downstream and I could see a nice looking spot ahead of us. It looked nicer and nicer as we approached it. Finally when we arrived, I was beyond excited because there were fish splashing all over the run. We had hit the hot spot. The timing coincided with a good hatch so the surface feeding frenzy was extremely intense. Dozens of fish came up repeatedly to sip down whatever they could fit in the mouth. I quickly changed back to a dry fly, the one that worked yesterday.
After ten or so drifts without getting a strike while fish were still coming up around it, I realized that the fly was too big to match the hatch. The second fly was smaller but still not small enough, so it also had the same reception. The third fly was the smallest one in the box so it was my last hope. A fish sipped it after a couple of drifts but I was too slow on the strike. A few casts later, another fish also went for it but it was not as lucky. Finally we had a connection. I carefully played the chunky westslope cutthroat and brought it downstream so it would not spook the others. After releasing it, I quickly came back up for fish number two, which fell for the fly after ten or so more drifts. Fish number three sipped the fly while I was not paying attention. I only realized that I had a fish on when I saw the floating line was pulled straight below the surface. These and a few misses were only a small percentage of fish that were in the run.
Our time was cut short when a thunderstorm rolled in quickly, forcing us to scramble back to the car for refuge. The storm passed after fiften minutes and we had blue sky above us once again, a pretty typical weather pattern in the Rockies.
The rest of the afternoon we explored a few new areas with only some success. No fish photos today, all actions will be available in a subscribers’ video soon.
Day three’s weather forecast doesn’t seem so enticing, so we may just take it easy and try a few spots nearby in Fernie.