God Bless Walter Mitty

A friend of mine pointed me to this blog post a while back and I thought it sounded like fun.  The gist of the Walter Mitty challenge is to catch six species of fish all under 10 inches in one day.  Finally I got around to giving it a go when I was back in Colorado a couple weeks back.  My last day in town I had about a half a day on my own to try some fishing.  In the six days previous I had caught plenty of fish and so going out in search of different species in one day sounded like fun to me.

The starting line was at the Sawhill Ponds northeast of Boulder.  I've fished here a number of times, and it's perfect for those days where you just feel the need to catch a bunch of little fish without thinking about it.  Toss any small fly in the pond and within five seconds you have a small panfish on your line.  They aren't big, but they actually fight somewhat hard.

I arrived at Sawhill and walked back to my favorite pond.  There are something like 15 small ponds in the area and they all hold fish.  The start was a little slow though.  I had to make three casts before I caught something.  Fish number one was a small bluegill.  One down, five to go.  I was planning on catching a pumpkinseed in the pond too and was hopefull for a small bass.

But things didn't go as smoothly as I hoped.  I fished the pond for about an hour and a half and only had one species under my belt.  Since I had limited time I decided to start walking back to the car and try another pond or two along the way in hopes of picking up another species or two.  Eventually I stumbled upon a smaller pond where I could see a ton of fish swimming around and decided to give it a go.  This was the money hole!  I started catching more rapidly and grabbed some impressively big panfish. I'm used to catching the 1-3" fish.  But here I picked up a couple significantly larger than my palms, and more importantly species number two, pumpkinseed!

At this point I was out of time and needed to head to location number two to pick up some trout species.  I was hoping to have a bass and or crappie at this point in order to actually be able to complete the challenge, but it wasn't in the cards.  Oh well.

I next hit up SBC in Eldo Canyon.  This is some fun pocket water with decent sized browns and rainbows.  The downside is you have to pay to park in the canyon.  Oh well.  It didn't take long to notch up two more species.  Brown and rainbow trouts.  Keep in mind, the point of the challenge is to catch small fish.

I kept fishing the river in hopes of catching a brookie, but I don't think I've ever caught one in this creek so they probably aren't there.  I could try to distinguish between rainbows, cuthroat and cutbows, but in my mind they are all so similar and I can't really tell them apart so I didn't.  Instead I failed the challenge.  :(

I guess I should have been fishing Boulder creek to catch something else surprising.