Fishing Reports: Fall 2011

I was going through some old posts, trying to update tags, and somehow this must have only been a draft. So it was posted in 2013, two years after the fact.

I don't have time to do this up right, and I know these are just notes-to-self, but let me just lay them down anyway.

10/28/2011, 1000-1300: St. Vrain from the white gate.

Started lower than in 2009, while river still on the right. Water is low, shop guys said 3 weight and small bugs would be good. Suggested nymphing earlier in the day, maybe weighting down an ant underneath. Also underwater: Rainbow Warriors, a blue tungsten bug. Small, 22 ish. 6x line-leader-tippet.

Ca. 10 am - ca 1 pm, sunny, probably got into 50s in the sun in the canyon. Banks are still super-snowy. Water looks great.

I put a caddis fly up top as a strike indicator and started with the rainbow warrior down low for some flash (mostly shady on the water). Caught a couple of small browns. Switched to the blue tungsten underneath, caught a few more small browns.

Walked up to where the road runs to right of the river, a hundred yards maybe and fished up for awhile. Caught one decent-sized (by which I mean maybe 10") rainbow on the rainbow warrior.

Last time (only other time) I got skunked, so 5-6 fish in 3 hours isn't terrible. But it wasn't in any way obvious. There are some great pools and lots of nice channels, but I mostly caught stuff when I could swing my wet fly underneath an underwater rock shelf. They mostly came out of crevices, not much happening out in the open.

10/24/2011, 0900-1300: South Boulder Creek, El Dorado Canyon

Parked right down and off to the right inside the park and fished the lower section of the river. I almost never go here, just because the fish are so obvious (cf. the St. Vrain, 10/28/2011), so visible in the high-traffic areas of the park (the bridge, the little path along the water for a few hundred yards or whatever it is), so accessible that I figure they get hardware thrown at them constantly and are gonna be curmudgeonly. But with traffic to the park down from the summer season, and the water coming down, I have been eyeing it and decided to try it.

Good times. Not trivially easy to catch fish, and they're bigger down here than in the middle section I usually fish (from 60 yds down from the Rattlesnake Gulch trailhead, up to the big pool or the upper bridge). So I am so used to this water that I was pretty well able to find the fish and persaude them to say hello. I think it was BWOs that were killing, on a slightly overcast day. Dry only, 3-weight rod, 6x line/leader/tippet.

10/21/2011, 0700-1200, Big Thompson River, b/w mile markers 70 and 71 on Highway 34

Came out way too early, but I had insomnia so what better was I gonna do? It was chilly in the morning, boy, but it warmed up to 50s by early afternoon.

Already having a hard time remembering what I was doing this day ... 5 weight I think (first time with the new reel), 5x line/leader/tippet. I probably caught a half-dozen fish, mostly browns and one rainbow. I can't really remember. It was nice, but not ridiculously better than what I can get a lot closer to home. Not as good as when I want at this same time of year in 2009.

ca. mid-October 2011, South Boulder Creek (1) west of highway 36, and (2) between South Boulder Road and Highway 36.

I have commuted past South Boulder Creek on highway 36 hundreds of times, but I have only fished the water you can see from the road once, and to my recollection only very briefly. Having been riding my bike to work, I have been watching the progress and regress of the fly shops located in the Table Mesa Shopping Center. While Rocky Mountain Anglers continues to thrive (I hope) because of its amazing people, gear and knowledge, "the other shop" on Table Mesa has had a bunch of turnover. Anyway, this shop had a sign in the window saying that Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) was creating some habitat in this flat area of the creek, at least the bits on either side of Highway 36.