Wow, it’s been a while since I posted here. Shame on me. And shame on the weather for ruining my fishing in the past weeks!
But I do have a couple trips from a few week to report on, which I never managed to get around to. While I was back in Colorado for the Thanksgiving holiday I managed to get out a couple times. One of my trips was a day trip up to the mountains to fish the Blue river. I’ve only been to this river two other times. One was the day after a 3x jump in water flows, so it was obviously a tough day. If I remember right the three of us all had a fish on and I did manage to pull a single fish in. 1 total fish. The second trip was last winter on a day where the outside temp when we arrived at the river was 10deg F. It was cold, there was snow all over the banks, ice on all the rocks, and again only a couple fish on or caught.
So of course I was excited to go back to this river that teems with fish, and the experience was not unlike the previous trips. In fact it was quite similar to the last time I was there. Cold, snow everywhere, line and eyelets freezing up constantly, numb fingers and numb toes. Here’s how warm it was:
Nonetheless, Brady and I went up to brave the cold and fight the fish. Yes, we were the only ones man enough to fish in the cold. The river is right below a big reservoir, which is why it fishes all winter long, and there was a pretty cool haze hanging over the reservoir. I don’t know much about weather, but I guess the cold air mixing with the slightly less cold water creates a lot of fog. It was pretty eerie and made me even less excited about the cold air.
But we arrived at the river put all our gear on and together anyway. By the way, it’s pretty hard to tie on small winter flies in cold weather with cold hands and a 10mph breeze doesn’t help things any either.
That’s pretty much all I can say about the fishing. I picked moss off my hooks and ice out of my eyelets all day with little to no action. We each hooked and lost one nice fish and Brady’s actually bent his hook, which is pretty cool. That’s pretty crappy for a solid 5 hours of fishing.
Brady had a nice trip though. He managed to fall in the river when we were on our way back to the car. Then he was unable to walk up the steep, snow-covered slope to the cars. I got the very tail end of it on tape, but the funniest part was when he slipped back down the same ten foot section about fifteen times. He probably didn’t find it funny since he was wet and cold but I couldn’t help laughing at him.
And the best part of all of this trip….the drive home. You have to love ski traffic on a holiday weekend on I70. Stop and go traffic for an hour or so was a lot of fun. That and I got sick off a big dip that I don’t usually do but was bored so I tried it. It didn’t work out well for me.
Oh, and I also managed to eat some tasty home-cooked and home-assembled Turducken over the weekend.
