FFO Practice Round 1

Hard to believe but the 2015 Frostbite Fish Off is right around the corner! Ben and I are going to be back this year as Team Chuck and Duck. This will be our third year fishing this tournament. It's always a great time and last year we actually placed 3rd!

It seems like we have an exciting tournament every year. Last year we needed one more fish to win the tournament. I hooked something heavy during the last minute of fishing and pulled in a sucker. The year before that a big rainbow broke my rod during the last minute of fishing! I'm almost a little gun shy for the last minute of fishing this year.

We didn't fish the river much this summer. Flows were very high for most of the summer which I think was great for the fish. I would imagine that pressure wasn't as much as it has been in resent summers. I did make one trip down at the end of August. Water was way up but a few hours of dredging produced this nice bow. This fish was healthy and strong! Very good sign. Hopefully those kinds of summer flows will continue. I think that a few years in a row like this past summer will grow some true pigs.

Ben and I decided that we better get our act together and get a few trips in before the tournament. We are going to try and fish as many beats as possible before the tournament. This trip we fished around the hatchery outlet and anticline bend. The hatchery outlet was tough first thing in the morning. I caught a few dinks but nothing sizable.

We worked our way upstream and saw that the anticline bend was open so we hit that. There have been some improvements made on this bend and this was the first trip Ben and I had fished them. VERY nice bend run. We hooked up right away on black midges and continued to have action for a while. This would be a sweet beat to get during the tournament.

After fishing this run for a while we made our way to the Nature Center and fished for another hour or so. We hooked and landed a few more nice trout to wrap up the afternoon.

Not a bad first trip. Good to get a few fish in the net and find out a few midge patterns that were hot. Hopefully we can get down to Pueblo at least half a dozen times before the tournament. As in our past FFO appearances our goal is to not finish last!

Fall Trip to the East Portal

Had to squeeze in one more trip to the East Portal in before winter hit and we just made it. I've been to the East Portal a few times in the past couple of years and it's really a fun place to go. I've never seen it crowded and there are a few runs that just produce nice, brick red bows.

Mike was able to make it on this trip after having to canx a trip the previous weekend because of work (get your priorities straight Mike)! We headed up Friday evening and hit Colorado Boy Pizza which is delish. Almost worth the trip itself. We rigged up, watched Low and Clear and were up around 5.

We got down in the canyon just before daylight. I walked over to look at the water and noticed the spillway looked totally different.  The far side of the spillway was really calm and a new central outflow had formed. It looks like the dam was damaged this spring in the high flows. So fishing was a little different from what we are used to but we still caught some nice fish.

White streamers cast right up against the spillway worked best in the morning. Dad was on fire for about 15 minutes. One right after another. Things calmed down though after about an hour and we moved upstream. No one pattern killed it the rest of the day but we picked up a few on egg patterns.

Not the best trip up to the East Portal but it was a fun time as always.