Saturday, August 25, 2012

Arkansas River (Pueblo)

Finally a trip with some fish pictures to post! It's been a little while since my last post. I've gone fishing twice since then but I didn't have many fish pictures to post. The first trip was to South Boulder Creek. I stared at private water most of that trip. If you have money and connections this is the place for you. The second trip was to Eleven Mile Reservoir. Ben Lewis, Mike Greene, and I rented a boat and tried our luck at trolling. Three fly fishers trying to get our gear on the bottom. Didn't catch a thing. Turns out we were supposed to be about 20' down. If we had done our homework before hand we could have saved the time rigging up 3Oz of weight on our rigs!

Decided to head back into the comfort zone and hit Pueblo on Sat. Mike, Marty, and I hit the river around 7:30. We parked just below the Nature Center and worked our way upstream. The flow was around 80 and had been most of the week. Luckily the water coming out of the damn is around 55 so the water was nice and cool. Not too hot when we started but that changed quickly. The only relief was also a curse. The wind picked up around 9 and really started blowing. It really blew. High wind when fly fishing blows. You get the point.

Pretty slow day on the river. We each caught fish but nothing big. There was a huge midge hatch from about 8-9 and a size 22 Top Secret Midge took a few. Size 22 rust Barr's Micro Emerger also took a few. Later in the afternoon size 20 Pheasant Tails seemed to be about the only thing the trout were interested in.

The most exciting part of the day came when Mike and I spotted a nice fish crusing around in some still water that pools up at the Flag Hole. We started sneaking up on it and I noticed it was missing an eye. I was wondering why it let me get so close to it. I took out my landing net and held it under about two feet and slowly slid it under the trout. As soon as the net was far enough under for the trout to see it I lifted straight up and netted him! It was a true Bear Grylls moment. Mike was quick to mention that netting a fish was not a proper fishing method and that the fish didn't count. Too bad because it was the nicest fish of the day!