Time: 9:45AM – 3:45PM
Location: National forest
Clear Creek 08/15/2023 Photo Album
Although my fishing outing on Tuesday, August 15 was decent by most standards, it could have been even better. Let me explain.
After a fun day on a high mountain stream on Friday, I was yearning for another day on a Colorado stream; however, I was in favor of a closer destination, so I chose Clear Creek. I left the house at 7:40AM in order to pass through Floyd Hill before the rock scaling operations began at 9:00AM. CDOT announced that motorists should be prepared for delays between 9AM and 3PM on Mondays through Thursdays. I successfully avoided this scenario and arrived at my chosen pullout without incident.
Stream Improvement
The air temperature was in the sixties, but highs in the nineties were predicted for the metro Denver area. When I left the stream on Tuesday afternoon the dashboard digital display read 77 degrees. It was a splendid day to be in the mountains with mostly clear skies and the absence of wind. I assembled my Orvis Access four weight and fought my way through the trees and brush to arrive at the creek and begin fishing by 9:45AM. The water was exceptionally clear, and the flows were nearly ideal. I began my search for trout with a Chernobyl ant, and the all foam terrestrial produced four trout in the early going, although I experienced an equal number of temporary hookups. In fact, the escapees seemed to be the largest fish, and I was quite upset about this circumstance.
Sparse Speckles
In an effort to convert a higher rate of takes, I downsized the Chernobyl ant to a peacock body hippie stomper, and this change produced a couple fish, before it lost its luster to the local trout. I added a salvation nymph on a short sixteen inch dropper, and the salvation contributed a few additional catches to the fish count. During the late morning time frame I attempted to roll cast the dry/dropper, and I was unaware of an overhanging evergreen bough, and this foolish action resulted in breaking off the hippie stomper and salvation. I pulled another stomper from my fly box, but I opted for a sunken ant as the bottom fly, and the ant yielded a pair of trout. By the time I paused for lunch the fish count rested on ten, as four devoured the Chernobyl, two grabbed the salvation, two nipped the sunk ant, and the remainder crushed the hippie stomper. Ten fish in two hours of fishing was respectable, but I could have easily doubled the numbers, if I converted a higher percentage of my hookups to the net, and I am forced to reiterate that the fish that managed to free themselves also felt like the larger trout.
Lovely Pool
Jake’s Gulp Beetle
Beetle Chomper
After lunch I changed things up significantly, as I was not satisfied with the catch rate or the size of the fish. I grabbed a size 12 Jake’s gulp beetle from my fly box and fished it solo. The change paid off handsomely, and I elevated the fish count to seventeen. During the early phase of the beetle slapping session, the trout responded very positively, and in many cases the trout smacked the terrestrial as soon as the foam imitation splashed down. Unfortunately, in one scenario a very nice fish sipped in the beetle and upon feeling the hook set, it raced downstream. I applied side pressure to keep the prize in the small pool, but it twisted its head, and the beetle was hurled skyward. Adding to the insult of losing the fish, the beetle came to rest in a tall evergreen twenty feet above me, and I was forced to apply direct pressure and snapped off another fly.
Subtle Beauty
The interest in the beetle seemed to fizzle after an hour of intense action, so I implemented yet another fly change. I plucked a lime green trude from my fly box in a fit of nostalgia, and the size fourteen dry fly notched a small cutthroat. The magic of the lime green trude was short lived, however, and I defaulted to the hippie stomper with a gray size 14 stimulator in the trailing position. The combination of the two buoyant dry flies, worked for while, but then refusals began to escalate, and I swapped the stimulator for a size 14 light gray deer hair caddis. The caddis worked its charms on the wild trout, until I quit at 3:45PM, and the double dry fly tactic enabled me to boost the fish count from seventeen to twenty-six over the course of the afternoon.
Side Pool Was Attractive
Melon Color
I landed a pair of twelve inch cutthroats, but the remainder were rather small and ranged from six to eleven inches. These cutthroats more than compensated for their diminutive size with an explosion of vivid colors. Pastel olive and tan provided the body background, but ink black speckles, pink accents, crimson gill plates and the classic orange slash finished the pallet of colors. I had numerous opportunities to land slightly larger trout, and this was particularly the case in the morning time period. Nevertheless, Tuesday was a fun summer day with nearly perfect weather and ideal stream conditions. One cannot ask for much more than that.
Fish Landed: 26