Arkansas River – 10/02/2012

Time: 10:00AM – 5:30PM

Location: Chaffee – Fremont County Line Upstream

Fish Landed: 28

Arkansas River 10/02/2012 Photo Album

After a great day on Friday, September 28 I was anxious to return to the Arkansas River while the favorable weather continued. The forecast called for temperatures in the 70’s for the Arkansas River Valley near Salida, so I pushed my work off until Thursday and Friday when the temperatures were projected to plummet, and made the long trip to Salida. How would Tueday compare to Friday’s outstanding day?

I arrived at the pullout below the county border at around 9:30, and once again it was quite chilly so I wore my Columbia long sleeve undershirt under my fishing shirt and added my raincoat as a windbreaker/outer layer. I stashed my lunch in my backpack and crossed the river at the shallow tail of the long pool straight below the car. Instead of hiking downstream as I had done on Friday, I climbed to the railroad tracks and walked west and then dropped down the steep bank to the head of the long pool. I tied five additional yellow Letort hoppers on Monday with full wings as these seem to float better than the ones I made with sparse wings. I put one on my line immediately and then attached a beadhead hares ear and began prospecting along the right bank and worked my way upstream.

Large Jaw

By noon I’d landed 11 trout mostly in the 9 – 11 inch range except for number nine and that was a nice chunky 13 inch brown and number eleven was a strong rainbow. Most of the fish went for the hares ear with perhaps one or two induced to rise to the hopper on the surface.

Nice Rainbow

After lunch I continued on my way and I began to notice a fairly dense swarm of midges hovering over the water with an occasional rise visible so I swapped the hares ear for a zebra midge and added a pair of decent fish on the size 22 midge larva imitation. Soon I began seeing a few BWO’s overlapping with the midges, so I switched the midge fly to a Craven beadhead soft hackle emerger. This fly became a hot producer and I was anticipating some great early afternoon action when I encountered a spin fisherman just above me. I chatted with the gentleman who told me that he and his wife had landed 52 trout so far on the day. He didn’t appear to be wading in the water very much so I continued fishing above him, but in short order he walked around me and waded across the river to his wife. He was a nice friendly fisherman, but I still wished he hadn’t disturbed the water.

Arkansas River

I probably should have rested the water and gone further upstream, but the area I’d reached was a great stretch with numerous riffles and runs of moderate depth and that was the sort of water producing fish. I remember noting that I was at 20 fish by this point, and as I cast to the top of one of the nice runs behind a rock, the hopper dipped and I set the hook and was attached to a hot fish. It immediately raced upstream to the left of the exposed rock and then paused a bit. Just as I began to apply pressure to gain line, the fish made a sudden move and accelerated further upstream. This move took me by surprise and the line popped and came flying back toward me. Both flies were gone and the line broke at the first surgeon’s knot that attached multiple sections of tippet to my tapered leader. I had three Craven soft hackles in my foam pad at the start of the day, and now two remained…one with a bead and one without.

Nice Rainbow After Lunch

I replaced the hopper with another that I tied on Monday and then added my last remaining beaded Craven soft hackle. It didn’t take long after this rude interruption before I hooked a nice rainbow as I got a good look at it when it leaped from the river. Once again I was battling a hard fighter but this time I let it run and take line and didn’t try to rush the process. Guess what happened? I gave the rainbow too much latitude and it ran downstream next to an exposed boulder and once again my line separated from the fish. I reeled up the line and the hopper remained, but the beadhead soft hackle was gone.

What should I do now? I wasn’t far from where I’d parked the Santa Fe so I considered wading across above my position, but I knew that I only had one remaining fly with a bead. Clearly I would need to tie some more of these effective flies when I returned to my fly tying desk, but that wasn’t going to help my current situation. I decided to try the soft hackle emerger without a bead by placing it as a dropper below a beadhead salvation nymph which would provide the extra weight. Perhaps this would actually work better if the BWO emergers were near the surface. This combination worked reasonably well as I landed another six small to medium size fish up until 3:30 with a few taking the hopper and the remainder chasing the soft hackle emerger; however, the beadhead version seemed to be more popular especially with larger fish.

By 3:30 it had actually gotten fairly warm and I’d gone without action for a bit so I decided to try a black woolly bugger and worked some medium depth runs with no results, not even a bump or follow. Above these runs I encountered a nice deep pool and as I stood on some high rocks on the north bank I could observe four different fish hovering a foot below the surface and occasionally sipping something small from the surface film. They were closer to the opposite bank so I made some long casts with the woolly bugger and allowed it to sink and then made some erratic strips near the visible fish, but there was no reaction. Next I tied on a Chernobyl ant and delivered some across and downstream drifts; however, after ten casts I realized that I couldn’t avoid drag long enough for the fish to get a good look, so I clipped it off and rested the water while I observed.

I decided that the only way to get a good drift over these fish was to cross below the pool and cast from the opposite side from below. I executed this move and began casting the Chernobyl upstream hoping that a large juicy attractor would induce a strike. Amazingly in the center run it aroused an eruption, but the fish turned away at the last instant. Again I rested the water and watched intently and observed a couple very subtle rises where the fish slowly came to the surface and sipped in something tiny. At the same time I saw a few sporadic BWO’s emerging so I replaced the Chernobyl with one of the size 24 CDC BWO’s that I tied for the Big Thompson. I moved upstream a bit to get better light on the lower part of the pool where the fish were active.

As I prepared to make downstream drifts to the target fish, I gazed across the river and noticed 4-5 fish rising next to the bank just below where I’d been standing before crossing. I debated returning but didn’t want to risk another dicey crossing so I refocused on the fish in front of me. Finally after quite a few downstream drifts I enticed a 13 inch rainbow to rise in the center current and sip in my fly. I was quite pleased to succeed in landing one of the fish I’d observed.

There was another deep pool 40 to 50 yards below my position but it had been occupied by a pair of fishermen when I passed on the opposite side, so I decided to explore that area for rising fish. Sure enough three or four fish were sipping in the eddy created by the huge protruding boulder above me. There was quite a bit of glare and riffle on the surface, and it was impossible for me to follow the size 24 fly, so I moved up tight against the large rock. This placed me above half of the pool, but more importantly I was above the area where the current fanned out and the fish were rising and the glare was eliminated. Once again I began making numerous drifts initiated by soft casts checked high to create a lot of slack and eventually another 13 inch rainbow tipped up its nose and sipped in my fly. On this note I called it a day and returned to the car for a three hour return trip.

I landed more fish than Friday (28 vs 26) and only lost two decent fish to break offs vs. four on Friday, and I didn’t lose as many flies, but the average size of the fish was down considerably. For this reason, I would rank the Friday Arkansas River adventure above the Tuesday outing. Will the weather provide me with one more trip to the Arkansas River in 2012?