Two Days With Differing Results

[spilunkr]

While my better half was still out of town on Friday and Saturday I got in two more days of fishing. But there are good days and then there are days that are not so good. Friday was one of those dues paying days.

With water levels still up I decided to pay another visit to the Indian Meadows stretch of the Poudre River. This roughly two mile long by quarter mile wide meadow is in the middle of the first C & R section and features a variety of water to fish from deep pools to riffles with lots of pocket water.






I had fished some of this same stretch about three weeks earlier and caught a number of nice browns. But, on Friday it was payback time. In the first three hours I fished, the only action I had were two half hearted rises to a hopper. There was no insect activity to try and match so eventually I went to a 3 fly Czech nymphing rig. In the last hour and a half I managed three smallish browns in the 9” to 11” range, with one fish on each of the three flies. It was a lot of effort for three browns.

On Saturday I decided to brave the crowds and try the Big Thompson in Rocky Mtn. National Park. I got an early enough start to get to the Fern Lake trailhead while there were still a few parking spaces. I even broke out my 2 wt., a rod I don’t use often enough, but I thought the upper Big T would be a nice place to try it. The fishing turned out to be almost the opposite of that I’d had the day before on the Poudre

I walked up the Fern Lake trail which parallels the river for a few minutes before starting to fish. My second cast of an elk hair caddis to a nice shady pocket under the overhanging branches of a fir tree resulted in a solid hit. I was shortly releasing a nice 11” or so brown, an average sized fish for this part of the Park.






Working my way upstream I’d caught another half dozen mixed browns and brookies when I came up on a guide and client who had just started fishing in front of me. It turned out the guide was someone from my local TU chapter I knew and he had not seen me around the bend in the stream. Since he was working, I told him I would go around and leave him a couple hundred yards of water before I started fishing again.

Well by then a number of other people had walked in and started fishing and I was having a hard time finding a stretch of unoccupied water. But, In walking back and forth between the trail and the river to check for open water, I crossed some sloughs backed up by some small beaver dams.



Peaking up over the top of the three foot tall bankside grass of one slough, I saw several rising trout which turned out to be brookies in the 9” to 11” range. I managed to catch three on a foam ant before the rest of the fish in the slough became spooked enough to not respond to any more flies.

I was still looking for some open water on the main river when I passed a small beaver pond on a side channel. So I walked down to get a closer look and saw several large brookies crusing in the gin clear water.



My first cast resulted in a hook up to a fat 12” brookie. He did not go very far after he was released so I got a shot of him sitting in the water.



But catching that one fish spooked the other half dozen nearby brookies and on my next cast they all spooked to the far side of the pond. So I headed up the trail further in search of open water on the river.

Well I finally seemed to get above the later arriving fishermen and found an open stretch to fish. But I was beginning to feel that my elk hair caddis should be getting more attention than it was so I started alternating it with a #12 foam ant. I’m guessing that the fish were seeing a lot more elk hairs than ants because all of a sudden I was getting all kinds of hits on the ant, even out in the fast water riffles. The hits were mostly from brookies with a few browns mixed in.

In the last hour of fishng that ant I managed to land three browns 9”, 12” and 12 ½” along with nine brookies from 7” to 10”. All told in four hours of fishing I’d landed just about two dozen fish; 2/3 brookies and 1/3 browns with about a quarter of the fish in the 10” to 12” range. All but one of the fish came on dries.

My wife’s parents are due in tomorrow for their first visit so I won’t be doing any fishing for awhile, but it was an interesting four days of fishing.

Guy

[Marcel_Karssies]

Nice report, you have picked a nice place to fish.
Maybe I will get a chance to go on another trout trip
soon, it will be interesting to see if the fish would
go for a foam ant.

From the pictures I would say the spot looks isolated but
appearantly it is not with all the competition on the water.

[djones]

Wives are indeed wonderful, but they do have a way of creating honey-dos which cuts into fishing time.

Glad you made good use of the free time, Guy.

[spilunkr]

Marcel,

I was not in a particularly remote part of Rocky Mountain National Park. The Fern Lake Trail is one of the most heavily used in the Park. There are four parking areas with spaces for roughly 60 cars in the last mile of the dirt road to the trail head. But these parking spaces fill up by 9 a.m. during this the peak of tourist season and after that access is via the Park shuttle bus service or a long additional walk from other parking areas along the paved road further down river.

When I trout fish, I tend to cover more water than most people. It was not hard to tell when I was approaching someone on the water in front of me as the number of strikes would drop significantly. Each time that happened, I would work around a bend in the stream and sure enough there would be someone 100 meters or so ahead.

A large proportion of fishermen don't seem to want to get very far from from their cars, so it took me until I was about 2 km from the parking lot before I managed to find a decent long stretch of water for myself.


Doug,

Since retiring and moving out here, my wife has become much more understanding about my getting out to fish. The honey do list is pretty small since the house is brand new and the small yard is xierescaped (what little grass there is takes 5 minutes to mow). She spends Monday through Friday in her studio, so we do things together on weekends. During the week I generally fish two days. The rest of the time is spent, hiking, biking, at the driving range and assorted odd jobs. It's great being retired.


Guy