Fishing

I took off last Thursday to fish the Provo. I had heard that The Green Drake hatch was coming off. It was only about a month late. I am always excited to be able to fish the Provo on a weekday. There should be far less people. Should be. I pulled into my semi-secret parking lot and found it not only full, but the road leading to it was jammed with cars. I figured that if I hiked up river far enough I could find a little tranquility. Seems everyone was looking for tranquility that day. I guess the fish don't like crowds either. I had a few strikes but brought on one fish to the net, it was a nice 14 inch rainbow who came up slowly from below to take my Green Drake. I got a few more strikes and fished until I ran out of light. That one fish was worth the day's effort.

The next day I went with Tom Meuleman and his friend, Wally to the North Fork of the Duchesne. After a short hike we waked onto the river that loads of bugs hovering over it This looked too good to be true. It was a hatch of many varieties of mayflies, caddis flies, and midges. I was asked what fly to use. Put on anything, I said. We began fishing and much to my chagrin, we brought up nothing. The next thing I noticed was that the water, which was clear and made the bottom visible was now murky and unfishable. We had to change plans. We drove up river and found some construction going on. We went above that and got down to the river again. This time we started picking up an occasional fish. It was difficult bring them up to the surface. In about two hours there I caught about 5 fish. I decided to switch from dry fly fishing to a "dry and a dropper". Off the dry fly I tied on a length of tippet about 12 inches long and then tied on a bead head nymph. My favorite is called the Rainbow Warrior. It is a small, size 20, hook with some tan and red dubbing with a tungsten bead. As soon as I had cast into a run an allowed the dry to drift down, the dry fly wiggled. I set the hook but I was too late. I soon learned that I had to have no slack whatsoever in my line when I set or I would be too late. Over the next hour, in one spot, I caught 20 fish. Tom and Wally had a deadline to leave as they were going to play golf that afternoon. If they had not had that, I would probably still be there.

Yesterday after work in Rock Springs, a friend called me and asked If I wanted to go fish the Green in the Seedskedee National Wildlife Refuge. Duh, it's fishing, why wouldn't I want to. My only question was do I get a annual nonresident license or pay the 14 buck daily fee. I figured that even with the conservation stamp you have to buy with the annual that I only have to fish 8 times in Wyoming to break even. Plus, I don't have to go and get a daily license every time I want to fish. We went as far as the Fontanelle dam and began wet wading. The wind was blowing and there was no surface action so we were stripping streamers across the riffles in the river. The wind was not our friend. Every once in a while it would let up and I would see bugs coming off the water. They looked like caddis to me. Then I saw a fish take one on the surface about 25 feet away. I quickly started tying on a caddis dry fly. I learned that the faster you need to tie on a fly, the slower you actually get the fly tied on. I took my time and negotiated the elk hair bristles nearly covering the eye of the hook and got the fly tied on. Was I too late. The wind was still down and I was able to get a nice dead drift over the spot where I had seen the fish before. Bam! He took that fly like he had not had a bite to eat all day. When I landed him I saw that he was a beautiful brown trout. He was only about 9-10 inches long but he will get bigger and maybe I can catch him again some day. That turned out to be the only fish I caught that day. In my optimism I noted a pattern developing. Catch one fish one day and then 25 fish the next. Hmmm. Should I go fishing tomorrow? Duh!