Fish Brain Fly Fishing Blog: February 2011

Jon had a trade show in Grand Junction all last week and mentioned he wanted to go fish Huntington on his way back on Friday. We made plans to meet at the Holiday Inn in Price Thursday night and we would hit the river in the morning. I invited Ricky and the touring party was formed.

That night we tied flies and watched Egypt finalize their revolution. We knew we would have to drive right up below the damn the next morning because the water flowing out would not be freezing. As we drove up th canyon the river was swallowed by snow and ice but we knew the tail water would be fishable.

I rigged up quick thinking I would be the first one in the water. Little did I know as I cut a trail towards the river I would end up chest deep in snow and struggling to move even a foot ahead at a time. Ricky and Jon took notice of my struggles as they rigged up and they wisely chose to walk to the bridge and get in there. I cut my losses (20 feet from the river but at least a 15 minute struggle) and walked back out the swath I had vigorously cut through the deep snow and worked my way towards them by the bridge. I finally reached them on the river and the jokes ensued.

The fishing was weird. We all caught one fish right off the bat and then it went cold. The flow was barely moving and the water turned murky. I was thinking something was in the water up above and it turned out to be about 100 ducks feeding on the plant life on the bottom of the river. Once we made it passed the ducks we smacked into the damn.

We hoofed back to the car and had some lunch and headed down stream to look for some faster moving current.... Found the faster moving current with a ton of spooky fish. We caught a few more and headed out.

The highlight of the trip being Jon spotting a 20" brown in slow moving current... We all casted at him but he wasn't interested. I think something may have been off though because he circled back down to where we were all standing and literally came to our ankles and tilted on his side and locked eyes with all three of us. It was really surreal and I have never seen anything like it. Keep in mind his size and the effort we put in casting at him for 20 minutes. It was almost like he was saying "hi" or checking us out..."what are you doing here??? you idiots!!!

The other highlight was Ricky catching his first trout on his brand new Sage fly rod and it was also his maiden journey on his first hand tied bug. That's two big firsts...

Below are a few pictures of the outing. We were all were kicking ourselves after we passed on taking pictures of the nice browns we caught right off the bat. "Do you want a shot of that one dude?" "Na... we are going to catch a ton more..." That's fly fishing.