On my way to Baltimore I stopped over in Denver last weekend for some fun. It started with some poker that I don’t really want to talk about Friday night, then Saturday was a sweet crawfish boil. I have a bunch of blurry pictures taken with my phone, and this is the best one:
Then we get to the good stuff. We got up early Sunday morning, and it was just Brady and I. No one else was all that interested in getting up at 6am to go fishing in 30deg cloudy weather. I would say I don’t blame them, but I do blame them. So we got up early, cleaned up his house a little since it was a mess from the crawfish boil activities the night before, and headed out around 7am. After a quick stop for a disgusting breakfast from BK we were on the way.
To take a step back, my previous post mentioned that I was watching the flows at SBC and was hoping to go there. It took some convincing, but finally Brady coerced me into going to a new place he had fished a few times recently: Cheeseman Canyon. This is a pretty famous and thus popular spot that is not too far from Denver. I had heard of it but never fished it. And I don’t really enjoy going to brand new places when I’m travelling because I know it will take me some time to figure it out and I probably won’t do too well. But I was promised it was a gem so there we were, on the road to the canyon. The drive in was at the very least nicely scenic…and laced with snow.
We parked in the lot and were the 4th car there. This is the sort of place where if you show up at 10am on a nice day you won’t find a place to park, and yes, they will all be anglers. The weather was pretty crappy on this particular day, below freezing and cloudy, but for this river that’s probably a good thing since it will keep the crowds away. We geared up and started the short hike to the river. The trail winds around a hillside and then T’s up on the river and you can walk either way. The downstream trail very quickly runs into the pretentious private club, and I ran down there real quick and pissed across the border. Then we headed upstream to find a good spot to fish.
We found a spot that Brady had fished last time without a ton of luck, but that holds quite a few fish you can see and he suggested I give it a try since I’m such a better angler. In retrospect I think he was tricking me into fishing the crappy hole. Anyway, I rigged up and started throwing small nymphs into the upstream run and watching them run down into the deep deep hole. It was a tough spot to fish because it’s one of those deep slow holes with a swift and shallow approach with a completely unpredictable drift. For whatever reason I do find these places fun to fish for a while, I suppose it is because I enjoy the challenge of trying to get a good drift.
There was a large rock in front of me , some slow slack water just after than, then a swift run before more slack water before yet another swift run, then one more bit of slack water before it got shallow near the other bank. I put on a boatload of weight, then I put on some more weight and hoped for the best. Most drifts through this sort of water aren’t going to be very good but eventually you get lucky and get a good one that will hopefully go near a fish. I don’t remember how long it took, but it wasn’t too long before I hooked into my first nice rainbow. He fought decently and must have been a real toad because he snapped me off and when I went to check my flies what I found was my top fly was still there, but the hook had broken right off!
You would think the fish must have been huge, and he was, I assure you, but I bought a bunch of hooks off eBay and I think this was one of them. The hook broke and the 4x leader did not. Lesson learned….do not buy hooks on eBay even if they are dirt cheap.
It was a nice fish. The blue tape marks 18”.
Not much later, Brady hooked into pig number 2 in the same spot while I was still struggling up above. Jerk. I reeled in my line and headed down with the camera.
Brady landed pig #2 and after a quick pic released him to go back home and create more pigs for later trips.
I threw a rock in where he was fishing and said we should move on. So we did. (I didn’t really throw a rock) We moved up a bit and I fished a better and easier looking run. I fished it for about 30 minutes with no luck. There weren’t many fish to be seen aside from a few sitting right in front of some logs stuck underwater, which were likely uncatchable. Not seeing any fish and not catching anything didn’t provide me with too much patience, so I gave up quickly.
We started working our way upstream a little quicker. I found quite a few spots that I thought looked good but didn’t produce. Finally I found a little pool with an eddy where a number of fish were facing downstream in the eddy and feeding. I tossed in there and pretty quickly hooked into a decent brown. He started swimming around and fighting and I immediately noticed there was a huge crack in the rock I was standing on. Down he shot. I assumed he would break himself off, but apparently that crack went all the way through the rock because he popped back out the front side in the current again and I fortunately managed to land him.
Shortly thereafter I nabbed my third fish. I don’t remember where he was or how I caught him. But I caught him.
We worked the water for another hour or so with no luck and decided to start heading back. I wanted to fish my way back so we walked along the bank and watched for fish. We spotted a couple in a few different spots and I casted to them a number of times with no luck. After those few more efforts we called it a day and hiked back to the car.
Overall it was a fairly frustrating cold day. I wish we had gone to SBC, but at the same time I can see the allure to this river. There are quite a few pigs in the water; they are just too smart for me.
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