The Day After
The day after the Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing event in Colorado, I was privileged to spend a day fishing. The weather was a bit on the cold and windy side—in fact, we awoke to snow showers. Still, fishing is fishing, and the four of us that had the day to fish bundled up warm and had at it. We fished nymph and indicator, and really big bucktails and leech imitations. We weren’t disappointed.
We rigged the nymphs with the indicator about 6 feet above the first nymph, which most of the day was a bright red San Juan Worm. Below that we dropped, tractor/trailer style, a Beadhead Prince Nymph, Beadhead Hare and Copper, Beadhead Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear, a caddis pupa, and similar imitations. Typically, too, we added a BB or 3/0 shot eight to ten inches above the Worm. Because of the cold weather, the river was cool to the point of being cold, and we needed the flies to stay right on the bottom where the fish were holding.
The big bucktails and leeches were rigged either on a full sinking line, or floating line with a long leader and two or three 3/0 shot to help the imitations stay down in the slightly off-color, fast water. We worked them with a variety of retrieves, but a slightly slower erratic strip seemed to be the best. The take on these big flies was always very robust.
And although we didn’t catch fish every moment of the day, we did catch some very nice fish—both browns and rainbows.
Our day started with snow showers.
Big bows like this one grabbed the deep leech with vigor.
Big browns like this one took both nymphs and the big bucktails and leeches.
Many of the larger browns were in the 10 to 13 pound class–great fish anywhere.
Nice work on a small nymph and 4X! Scott Carver displaying just one of several big browns he took on a small nymph.
My final big brown of the day was very pale–almost like a lake fish.