Time: 10:00AM – 2:00PM
Location: West of Boulder, CO
Boulder Creek 09/05/2018 Photo Album
I completed errands on Tuesday and attended my physical therapy appointment, and this positioned me for my first day of fly fishing in September 2018. September is generally my most productive month, and with my son Dan’s wedding scheduled for September 14, fishing days were not on the calendar during the forthcoming week.
I was reluctant to undertake a long trip, so I settled on Boulder Creek in the canyon west of Boulder, CO. I also considered the Big Thompson River and Clear Creek, but I was intrigued with the possibility of plopping terrestrials in a canyon setting. Flows were in the 30 CFS range, and I gauged this to be nearly ideal for early September.
A Good Place to Begin
I departed Denver by 8:45 and arrived at a pullout along Boulder Creek by 9:40AM. As I traveled along the creek, I was concerned with the cloudy state of the water, so I stopped four miles up the canyon for a closer look. My inspection confirmed a level of turbidity, but visibility was good to three feet, and given the small nature of the drainage, I concluded that conditions were acceptable. The clarity improved considerably as I traveled west, and after an hour of fishing, murkiness became a non-issue.
I walked downstream along the shoulder of Canyon Boulevard for .2 mile, and then I angled down a steep bank to the edge of the creek. I began my quest for trout n the canyon with a Jake’s gulp beetle, and the first two plops initiated successive temporary hookups. I was pleased with the quick response, but I was also disappointed with my inability to stay connected. My optimism surged as I dropped a few casts in the next plunge pool downstream, but my beginners’ luck would not repeat.
I was about to reverse my direction in order to progress upstream, but I gazed down the canyon, and I was drawn to a series of plunge pools farther east, so I scaled the bank and ambled along the highway for another .1 mile and then repeated my careful descent. Another ten minutes of beetle plopping failed to interest the trout, so I reevaluated and made a change. I exchanged the foam beetle for a hippy stomper with a peacock dubbed body, and beneath the attractor I added a size 14 beadhead hares ear on a thirty inch dropper.
Shimmering Orange Spots
The two fly dry/dropper combination served me quite well, and I built the fish count to fourteen over the next two hours, before I broke for lunch slightly before noon. Two out of every three fish nabbed the hares ear, but an ample quantity of eager brown trout also crushed the hippy stomper on the surface. I adopted the practice of applying floatant to the body as well as the antron wing, and gooping the wing improved the visibility of the fly noticeably. The process of prospecting and moving quickly up the canyon was very enjoyable, and the trout of Boulder Creek were very cooperative.
Sleek
During my entire day the sky was mostly cloudy with only a few brief periods, where the sun broke through. The temperature remained in the sixties, and I wore my raincoat for warmth throughout the four hours. Although rain seemed like an imminent possibility, I never felt a drop, until I was removing my waders at the end of the day.
Appealing Shelf Pools
After lunch I continued with the hippy stomper and hares ear and built the count to twenty, and at this point I decided to experiment with different combinations. First I cycled through a series of changes to the dropper fly, as I tested a salvation nymph and ultra zug bug. The salvation fooled one fish, but after a reasonable trial period I concluded that it under performed the hares ear.
The takes of a Jake’s gulp beetle at the outset of my day made an impression on me, so I reverted to the beetle, but it never induced as much as a look. I concluded that dry/dropper was the approach of choice on Wednesday, so I adopted a three fly dry/dropper configuration. This time I knotted a size 12 Chernobyl ant to my line and then added the beadhead hares ear and an amber body caddis pupa. The hares ear enabled me to increment the fish tally by two to twenty-two, and the Chernobyl provoked a number of refusals and temporary hook ups.
Cascading Creek
I approached a nice pool and observed a few sporadic rises, which I attributed to a blue winged olive hatch. I swapped the caddis pupa for a size 22 RS2, and continued my upstream quest for trout. I expected action on the droppers, but a small brown trout responded to the Chernboyl, and I was both pleased and surprised by this circumstance. A pair of brief taps by trout on the lift gave me hope that the RS2 was in demand, but the small nymph never yielded a trout.
As two o’clock drew nearer, the sky grew increasingly dark, and I spotted a couple caddis, as they dapped the surface of the creek. I intended to quit a 2PM, at which point I needed to remove my three flies, so it was not a huge commitment to take that action early in order to experiment with a size 16 gray deer hair caddis. The ploy paid off somewhat, as I landed a small brown trout on the caddis adult just before I called it a day.
As expected Wednesday’s action consisted almost entirely of small brown trout in the 6 – 10 inch range. The Chernobyl ant and salvation nymph accounted for two fish that made it to my net, and the remaining twenty-two favored the hippy stomper and beadhead hares ear in a ratio of two hares ears for every hippy stomper. Carefree casting to relatively small eager brown trout was what I hoped for, and the results lived up to expectations.
Fish Landed: 24