Arkansas River (Pueblo)

Damn it was hot in Pueblo today! We got to the river around 8 and it was already hot. I didn't even stand in the parking lot to get rigged up, I had to go stand in the river. The fish felt the heat too. Pretty slow day as far as the Ark goes but it wasn't without it's excitement.

Marty and I met up with David and Stephen behind the nature center. I fished the bend hole for a while and might have missed one but things started off slow for me. Marty started on some pocket water behind a boulder diamond (seen behind Marty in this pic) and almost instantly hooked into this nice 17" rainbow. He took several nice runs but eventually came to the net. Good start to the day!

We worked our way upstream but didn't make it too far up from the Nature Center. The heat made walking upstream very unattractive so we stayed planted in a long run just down from the first weir for the rest of the morning. We each landed a few trout but things were pretty slow. The pics to the left here are two out of three trout that I landed all morning. Marty had the suckers dialed in though and that at least kept things interesting between trout. I hooked probably 4 or 5 more but just couldn't get a solid hookup for some reason. I'm thinking that the heat makes the trout lazy because the takes were very subtle. Or the heat just  made me zone out and miss the take. Either way it was frustrating.

After Marty took this last picture here we heard David say, "Marty I'm really sorry man". We turned around to see him holding two pieces of a fly rod up. "I didn't see you had left your fly rod on the bank over here". You could hear our jaws hitting the water.... Very awkward moment... I could feel the tension building when David put his rod back together and said, "just kidding". So WRONG but hilarious at the same time! He had both of us hooked good! Unfortunately for David we were the only things he hooked into that day. (Sorry David, pay back is a bitch!).

Even the deer were hot yesterday! We saw this guy crossing the river just upstream from us. He really took his time getting across. I expected him to roll over and float down the stream on his back.

We decided to work back toward the Nature Center because the girls were meeting us for lunch. I landed on small bow on the way back. I got all the way around the bend just below the Nature Center. I fished there for a few minutes and when I got back around the bend I saw Marty just upstream. He said, "Dude I needed you!". I'll let him tell the story from here.


"Anyway, around 2:00 or so Alicia and Laurie joined us at the Nature Center for lunch and some wading to cool off. Was about 103 * On the way down to meet them, I hit the same hole I had fished this morning and BOOM. A really nice 25" Brown took my blood worm pattern. I immediately looked for Jamie, I was gonna need help with this monster, and he was way down stream around a bend and I couldn't see him. To make a long story short, the Brown cut across stream my reel screaming with him. This is the first time I've ever had a fish on that took me to my backing on my reel. After about 20 minutes of runs, head shakes, jumps, etc, we had fought about 50 yards downstream from where we started. I had made it into shallow water, and was actually backing up the bank, when the Brown saw three big rocks and made a bee-line into them. SNAP. No more trout, and minus one Bloodworm, :( Witnesses wading behind the nature center were also yelling OMG ! ! ! ! That is a monster fish. The ones that get away are the ones that haunt our dreams."

Another big one that got away. Story of our lives!