Time: 7:15PM – 8:00PM

Location: Inlet of Ruedi Creek

Fish Landed: 3

After a spectacular day of fishing on the Frying Pan River, one would think that I’d be ready to relax and toast the day with a cold beer. Unfortunately I still possess the “fly fishing disease”, and I was interested in returning to the reservoir for some evening fishing. In order to save time, I kept my waders on while I prepared and ate my basic dinner. After washing the dishes, I returned to the beach next to where Ruedi Creek enters the lake. Unlike Wednesday evening, however, I used my waders to cross the creek so I could cast from the western shore, and this enabled me to cast upstream and allow my flies to drift back with the current of Ruedi Creek and into the lake.

The tan Charlie Boy hopper, beadhead hares ear, and beadhead pheasant tail remained on my line from fishing the Frying Pan River, so I gave them a a try first. They were ignored so I tried a Chernobyl ant as the surface fly and swapped the pheasant tail for a zebra midge as I noticed quite a few midges swarming over the water. Unfortunately the fish disdained all three of these offerings, and I’d now used up 20 minutes of my precious daylight fishing time.

I decided to return to a size 16 gray deer hair caddis, since that fly at least producing two takes on Wednesday evening. Once again the caddis did the trick, and I landed three stocker rainbows before it got too dark to see my fly. One of the rainbows was around 12 inches. The evening fishing certainly did not compare to the afternoon on the Pan, but I did entertain myself with some productive dry fly fishing, and that is always a positive.