2015 Frostbite Fish-Off

Well its been a good stint since the weekend of the 2015 FFO and I think it's all finally sunk in. All in all it was just a fantastic day of family, friends, fun, fish, and unexpected twists of epic proportion!

This year was the third year Ben and I have fished the tournament as Team Chuck and Duck. For those of you that might not be familiar with the name, we named our team after my casting style. Especially when hucking slabs of mojo mud and rabbit.

Before I start reminiscing, I just want to thank everyone who is involved with putting on this awesome tournament. I don't know of too many events that are this much fun AND support such a good cause. Everyone at the tournament from the beat controllers to the meal volunteers did a fantastic job and they were all a pleasure to spend time with. Ben Wurster and Lou McCullough did an awesome job as our fearless leaders again this year. Always good catching up with those two. I've learned a lot from them over the past three years about fishing this river. Any time you can help someone catch and release a true gem of nature, you have done the world some good and I am indebted to you both!

I also want to thank all of the sponsors who stepped up. Every year there are a ton of cool prizes for the grab bags, raffle, biggest fish, and top teams. I can't remember how much Ben Wurster said the total amount of sponsor donations came out to this year but the amount of goodies up for grabs this year was incredible. Ben and I had no idea what we were in store for. On to tournament day!


It was good catching up with everyone Sat morning before heading out to our beats. I've "met" a lot of folks through social media over the past few years and its always cool to actually meet some of my cyber friends in real life. Sat morning I finally met Jim Browning and his Son Kevin. Two of the nicest, most down to earth, talented Dudes you could meet. We all hit it off right away. It was like seeing an old friend you haven't seen in years. Strange feeling when you just met someone for the first time. Nice to finally meet you guys and hope we get to fish together soon!

I was also able to catch up with an old high school buddy. Chris Ramos and I have known each other for a long time. We didn't run together in the same crowd in High School but we somehow quickly discovered that we were both fly fishers. It's amazing how this sport brings people together. Always good to catch up with Chris and see where he's been guiding. If you are looking to fish Cheesman Canyon or any water for that matter I would highly recommend going with Chris. He would wind up catching the biggest fish of the tournament this year. No surprise to me. Congrats again Dude!

Ben Lewis and I missed the beat drawing the evening before so we showed up the day of the tournament wondering where we would be fishing. We've had pretty good luck every year we've fished this tournament and this year was no exception. We drew beat one for the morning and beat seven for the afternoon. Two good beats but we were a little nervous since we had never fished the beat one stretch before.

After sucking down a fat pill and a few cups of coffee we headed out to our first beat. We knew it was going to be a beautiful day so we were a little worried about what the crowd would be like on the river. We got up to the dam and I decided to walk up around the bend to see what the water was like just below the dam. W! T! F!!!! I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This has got to be some of the nicest water on the entire stretch of Ark in Pueblo. It looked like the Toilet Bowl on steroids! I couldn't believe we had never taken the time to walk up to the dam before.

The only drawback was that it was a TON of water to cover and a good part of it was pretty much unreachable. Just like fishing the Toilet Bowl it would take some time to figure out how to dial in to the fish. Time is something we didn't have a lot of. We decided to hit the low hanging fruit and started at the tailout where the river narrows and drops into a nice bouldery cut. Ben hooked up almost right

Dramatization. Thanks Marty!

away. I grabbed my net, took two steps, and went for a swim. I emerged rod and net in hand to see our first fish of the tourney in Ben's net. A dink, but we were on the board! Lucky for me it was already starting to warm up. As Ben Wurster would later say, "We may need to change the name to The Banana Belt Fish Off"!

I wrung out my sleeves and cast just upstream from where Ben hooked up and had another dink in the net in a cast or two. It was good to get some fish in the net right away but everyone knows what can happen when you catch a fish right off the bat.....

We went the next fourty minutes or so without a hit..... I was worried. I was thinking we had the first cast fish stink on us and that we were going to post a few dinks for our morning session. Our goal for this tournament has always been to not finish last and I was thinking we might be in some trouble.... I knew there had to be monster fish in this stretch but we were not dialed in and we didn't have time to figure it out. We decided to head downstream.

How many nets does a guy need?

Our luck changed when Ben hooked and landed what would wind up being the nicest fish of the morning, a sorely needed eighteen inch bow! Now we had a descent fish on the board. We continued to hook fish for the rest of the morning session in the lower stretches of beat one but we didn't hook anything big. I'm not sure how many dinks we wound up catching but they were all in the ten to twelve inch range.... Most of them we didn't record. We did wind up posting four fish for the morning session though which we had learned the year before is really one of the best things you can do, even if you're not posting four monsters. Big thanks to Richard Purcell, our morning session Controller, for running all over to measure the dinks we were pulling in. He got his exercise for sure!

Lou at his last BPOE dance

Back to the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE) for lunch. The BPOE was a change (for the better) of venue this year. Really thought they did a good job and provided a nice facility. It was a little further from the river but it was close enough to get to the river in ten to fifteen minutes depending on what beat you were on. The only strange thing was that I think they still had some decorations up from what looked like some sort of prom.... Kinda weird seeing a bunch of trout bums hanging out on the prom dance floor....

We headed out to beat seven in fourth place. Like I said, you don't have to catch monsters all day long but you do need to post four fish each session. Makes you appreciate a twelve inch trout like it was your first trout on a fly rod. We were not in last place, I had dried out for the most part, we had fresh rigs, and were feeling pretty confident going into the afternoon session.

Pump house is open?!!??

We decided to get there a little early to see if we couldn't claim a stretch of water for the PM fishing. It was REALLY starting to fill in. Beat seven is a pretty popular spot for fly fishers, hardware guys, and bait casters alike. We walked up the stream a bit and the best run by the pump house was OPEN. Bubbas everywhere up and downstream but the run we wanted was OPEN. We did some range walking in the waders and were out standing in the river, fly rods in hand, but unable to cast until the afternoon session started..... What made it worse is that I could see at least four trout and two of them were in the twenty inch class.

It was hard staring at them for a while before the afternoon session started but it was good in the sense that it really gave me some time to study them. I could tell how they were moving and I could pick out how the biggest fish in the run always moved to the same two places moving in and out of her preferred feeding lanes at will. The others were happy to move out of the way. Interesting thing to watch. I should probably do it more but I'd need to leave the rod in the truck.

We started whipping the hell out of them as soon as the whistle blew so to speak.... Poor trout.... Of course just because you know where the feeding fish are and what is hatching it doesn't mean that you are going to just start hooking up at will and it took some indicator/weight/fly size/pattern changes before our first take. These fish see a lot of flies and they weren't making any concessions... tournament or no tournament these fish denied our best on multiple occasions. It didn't take too long though and we had two nice fish on the board. Not too long after that we had four fish on the board.

That was a great feeling! Having eight fish posted for the day took all the pressure off. Ben and I have always tried to keep this tournament fun but we are the type of guys who can't help but get a little competitive and we knew we had posted a respectable day of fishing. Everything from that point on was icing on the cake!

Now it was time to dredge for the big boys. The sun was getting lower and the hatch had died off. The feeders moved into deeper water and out of sight. It was time for the fatties to wake up to steak and eggs. Say what you will but when I have 4x, a BB covered in Mojo, and my favorite leech and egg pattern on I feel like every cast is going to be a big fish.

Steak was eaten right away. I've been tying leeches with hobby lobby necklace leather and red GSP and they have been getting destroyed just about everywhere I've taken them. No love on the egg though so I started going smaller until I got a bite on the egg. Had a killer rig at this point, the sun was getting low, and the action exploded. For a little while it was almost every other cast. No better feeling than getting dialed into a run. You can taste the expectation of a take. They all had their noses on the drop off and you could almost call exactly when the take was going to happen. Serenity. Another huge thanks to our afternoon controller, Bill Straight. I swear the fish knew exactly when he had made it back to the bank and sat down. That usually was good for a fish :-)

We finished with four nice fish on the board for our afternoon session. My Old Man totaled up our trout from the morning and the afternoon and we thought that we might have a chance of grabbing third. We knew the caliber of sticks on the other teams and we knew it would be hard to place at all. I knew Jim and Kevin were in the running for sure if they had a good afternoon. We also knew the Blue Collar Fish Bums, Pat Thurman and Manual Losoya had absolutely killed in the AM session like they always do and would be extremely hard to catch in the afternoon. Then you had the Scott-Costa Fish Daddies, Frank Smethurst and Nate Bronson who are more like fish magnets who had a rough morning but could always come back big on a good beat. Team No Name (common Chris! You can come up with a better name than that with that Liberty HS diploma!), with Ramos  and Kevin Egloff would be in the thick of it for sure if he got a good beat in the PM. These were just the teams I knew about. Who knew what the Trout Ninjas, Big Uglies, or Catch-N-Repeat were up to..... Yep, just having a shot a placing was a great feeling.

Back at the dance floor we had a nice dinner and unwound talking to our friends about how the PM session went. Sounded like the fishing, for the most part, had been good in the PM. Lot's of smiling faces. I met Kyle Beasley on the High Plains Drifter Team who mentioned that he read the journal and that he actually caught a fish that day on a purple egg sucking leech!! Very cool!!

It was incredible to have my Family there to enjoy the day with me. My better half Alicia was there the whole day taking pictures and my Mom and Dad were there cheering us on. For some reason the kiddos didn't want to come down to Pueblo and watch us fish all day though....The time had finally come to see where the pieces had fell for the day.

I was thrilled when third place was announced and it was Team Trailing Edge with Jim and Kevin Browning. Awesome! This was the first time these guys had fished this tournament and they placed third! Again guys, Congrats!! Couldn't happen to better Dudes..... Then it dawned on me that we were going to come in second! No friggin way. When the total was announced for second place, I turned and looked at my Dad in disbelief who was staring right back at me with the same expression. I couldn't believe it. What???!!! no way did we do better than Pat and Manual. I was thinking there must have been a mistake or something but somehow Team Chuck and Duck edged it out for first place by four and a quarter inches! Unbelievable! The day went from great to epic. Ben and I were in shock. Ben Wurster and Lou McCullough gave Team C&D an intro I'll never forget. So glad Alicia caught it all on video. I hope I get the chance to look at this when I'm old and gray and remember what a day it was in Pueblo that day.

We had no idea what we were about to be handed. Brand new Scott Radians paired with Able Super Series! What!!!! In return for a day of fishing??? Oh and to top it off a coupon for any pair of Costa Sunglasses?  We're not worthy! We're not worthy!!!! We suck!!! LOL Just unbelievable.

Frank Smethurst came over and congratulated us and we thanked him a few times for the unbelievable prizes. I've since used the rod/reel/sunglasses a few times and am hooked.

What an unforgettable experience. A once in a lifetime sort of day. This tournament has blown our minds for three years in a row now. Each year something exciting and unexpected happens. Each year we meet new people and learn new things. This has become an annual tradition for Ben and I and we're already looking forward to next year.

I'll wrap it up by sharing Jim Browning's thoughts on the day which I thought provided a perfect summary.

"Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in the 2015 Frostbite Tournament as Team Tailing Edge ... For six hours, Kevin and I drifted our very best bugs, and when the day was over, we stood proudly next to these amazing anglers. So honored to compete, and share life with each of these great men. Thank you for taking the time to speak into my life, with kindness, and grace as we share a passion for the river"!