Frozen Sun Screen on the Taylor

You learn things when you are a ginger. Things non-gingers may not learn. One of those things is that sun screen will freeze solid. And when that happens you can decide to keep fishing and risk a painful week of batman eyes and ridicule, or you can sit in the car with the heater cranked directly on your bottle of life saving copper tone and warm up enough to feel your face again. I decided to warm up and avoid the lobster skin.

And I needed to warm up. Air temp was -5 when we started fishing at 7:30 and the wind was whipping. It was all I could do to flick a few yards of line out and stiffly rotate like a robot as I followed my indicator downstream. Hook sets were extremely delayed. Dad hooked up first and a 14" brown came up to the surface. "Ah damn it..... get off"..... Hmm... we are freezing our asses off standing in a mountain river in January fishing and we don't really want to hook a fish. Why? because the release part of catch and release will require you to take your gloves off  and hold your hands underwater. I had a moment of self doubt. What the hell was I doing? Why was I fishing when I didn't really want to catch a fish (under 24")? Why are we the only ones fishing one of the most pressured tailwaters in Colorado on a Saturday?

The reason showed up before the sun hit the water. Not the biggest fish in the run but a super nice male brownie. As soon as you see a fish like that on the end of your line everything else goes away. The weather was cold but the fishing was hot. We pulled at least a dozen fish out of the Avalanche Hole before 9:30.

All in all it was a good day of fishing. We both caught double digits and we had fairly steady action throughout the day. The hot pattern for me is what I call a Grinch Egg. It's a chartreuse egg tied on a red hook with a white halo. Killer pattern all over the place.  

I think we had a first on this trip. My Dad managed to switch flies in the hotel room the night before! He was rigged up and ready to go and I was tying some of my leach patterns and he couldn't resist :-)

Breezy on the Ark

Mr. Greene with a nice little bow

I had my eye on the weather last week and Saturday's forecast was pegged as awesome by several people on TV that guess weather for a living. If more than two guesses on different channels happen to be identical then you can be 100% sure that 60% of the time they're right every time. A little Anchorman humor there for you.

Mike, Ben, and I also had the pleasure of having my better half, someone that actually knows how to take a picture, out with us for a little fishing and picture taking. Not only did Alica take some great pics, she managed to get out of 8th St. Walmart on a Saturday morning with a fishing license in hand before the bus left the station (10 minutes, which was announced by some ahole as Alicia was getting out of the truck).

Again, my fellow Colorodeans did not disappoint and were out in droves taking advantage of another beautiful sunny, warm, winter day in Colorado. The only catch was the gale force winds that came along with that warm sunny weather. I always learn something new when I fish and this trip it was not to tell someone how good a run is if it requires them to cast directly upstream into 40 MPH winds! Mike didn't think the run was that great :-)

We weren't on fire by any means but we all caught fish and had a good time. Main thing that came out of this trip for me is that it seems like on descent days in the winter you can pretty much set your watch to the midge hatch that seems to be heaviest around 12:30 - 1 PM. I've tried a bunch of test patterns based on samples I've taken, but to be honest with you a black beauty is hard to beat. Mike did find another midge emerger pattern that was also pretty hot which I will share with you all after the Frostbite Fish-off!

Location:  Anticline Bend
Time: 1:00 PM
Water Temp: 40
Weather: Sunny / Windy 58
Hatch: Midge (fair)
Stage: Pupa/Adult
Size: #18-22
Abdomen Color: Olive / Brown
Thorax Color: Black
Head Color: Black
Wing Color: Clear / Dun
Shuck Color: Light Tan
Sample: Yes

Notes: Sample contains an big adult midge as far as midges go. It was pushing a size 18. Big damn midge!