Time: 9:30AM – 2:30PM

Location: .5 mile below end of catch and release water

Fish Landed: 18

Big Thompson River 10/03/2012 Photo Album

Wednesday was forecast to be the last nice day until early the following week so I decided to once again take a fishing day. The flows on South Boulder Creek were back up to 107 cfs so I was tempted to give that nearby stream a try. Waterton Canyon was still running at depressingly low levels of 30 and I didn’t want to invest in the preparation and physical exertion required to bike up the canyon with flows that low. The Big Thompson flows were up to 75 and I tied tiny size 24 flies for the BWO hatch and hadn’t had a chance to deploy them there, so that became my destination. It was supposed to reach the low 80’s in Denver, and then a cold front was expected to move in and create a 20 degree plunge in temperatures. I decided to fish until the plunge arrived.

Beginning Point on Wednesday

I decided to drive downstream below the dam beyond the end of the special regulation water. I did this in the afternoon a year ago and had some reasonable success, and I felt this area was not as crowded as the catch and release water. I arrived at a nice wide pullout .5 miles downstream from the special regulation water and was in a position to fish by 9:30. I tied on one of the newly minted yellow Letort hoppers and added a beadhead hares ear beneath and began working my way upstream. The gradient was pretty steep so I performed quite a bit of rock climbing along the bank and moved from plunge pool to pool while I skipped cascades and rapids in between.

Typical Small Colorful Rainbow

I landed four trout in the first hour, but the action seemed quite slow in spite of this as I covered a lot of water and made many casts. In the second hour I broke off the beadhead hares ear and elected to convert to a salvation nymph as my dropper. The newly discovered productive fly really performed and I landed another 10 trout before breaking for lunch. I discovered that most of my catches were in narrow deep slots right next to the bank typically with tall grass growing and predominantly rainbows attacked the salvation on the lift.

Salvation Nymph Produced

Unfortunately right before lunch another factor came into play in a major way and that was wind. Extremely strong gusts blasted down the canyon intermittently and I had to stoop into the wind, grasp my hat and hold my flies out to avoid getting toppled over. Unfortunately this wasn’t enough and a powerful sudden blast caught me by surprise which resulted in my losing footing and momentarily falling in some shallow water. Only a tiny amount of water trickled over my waders, and it wasn’t enough to cause me to quit or even discomfort, but the wind certainly took much of the fun out of fishing. It was nearly impossible to cast, and when I was able to execute a forward cast between gusts, accuracy was absent.

After lunch the wind continued to howl and unfortunately the fishing slowed so I was really losing interest. From noon until 2:30 when I retired for the day I landed another four trout, but the amount of action did not compensate for the frustration of climbing rocks and battling the wind. Over the last hour I switched the salvation nymph for one of the new Craven soft hackle emergers that I tied the night before, and I managed to land a nice rainbow on the emerger, but that was the extent of its effectiveness.

Chubby Rainbow

The wind literally blew me off the water. I landed 18 fish, and that was rather rewarding considering the conditions, but perhaps only one fish reached 12 inches. Perhaps two of my netted fish were browns and the remainder were rainbows. The rainbows were brightly colored but rarely extended beyond seven or eight inches, so that may have been another reason for my disappointment. As to the BWO hatch, I may have left before it occurred but I can’t imagine the tiny mayflies spending any time on the surface of the water with the strong gusts of wind present in the canyon. When I arrived back in Denver, Jane and I dropped off the Santa Fe for a 30,000 mile service appointment and the temperature did in fact plummet from 85 to 65 in the matter of 30 minutes. I was certainly glad I escaped the wind before the temperature took a dive as well.