The almost-perfect summer or 2016
is winding down, and with Labor Day just around the corner the peak of fishing
season awaits. There are almost no bad
places to fish anywhere in Colorado
in September and October, and no where is that more true than along the Upper
Colorado River. Reservoirs
are near-full, flows are high and steady
and just about ideal for floating, and will stay that way until Halloween.
There were a couple of weeks in
July during the monsoon flows where the river did get too off-color for
fishing, but that’s pretty normal here.
Within a day or two of those events happening, the river clears up again
with extra-hungry fish waiting to annihilate your grasshopper. And this summer, one positive aspect of those
off-color days occurred to me that I had never considered. Because when a river
isn’t perfectly clear, it seems to keep it a bit cooler, and less sunlight
shining directly on the river bottom means less algae growth. This summer the nearby Roaring
Fork River
has been plagued by rampant algae blooms, in part because its runs clearer than
the Colorado does. So even though the Fork can be a safer bet to
fish if its been raining, you’ll pulling up less greenery with your dropper
flies and streamers in the Colorado River.
In September of 2012, Colorado
Parks and Wildlife stocked 30,000
Hofer Rainbows in the river between Dotsero and the Roundup River Ranch. This
was due in part to jumpstart the fishing after a major fish kill caused by a
flood on Sweetwater Creek that July..
Ever since then, the rainbow populations have been doing great, and the
fishing here might be the best it’s ever been.
When I moved to here in 1986, the Colorado River was
primarily a rainbow trout fishery, with some browns mixed in. Anecdotally, the
ratio seemed to be perhaps ten to one rainbows to browns. Then in the late 1980s, whirling disease hit
hard, exacerbated by the new Windy Creek reservoir, and by the late 1990s that
ratio had flipped with browns now the dominant trout species.
Parks and Wildlife (then the DOW)
began stocking Hofers above Kremmling about ten years ago, and slowly those
fish began making their way all the way down to the stretch I like to call the
“Lower Upper”, or the river below State
Bridge but above the Colorado’s
confluence with the Eagle at I-70. As of
this summer, the browns still outnumber the rainbows, but by a margin of
perhaps two or three to one. What that
means is that we are rapidly approaching a fishery that’s nicely balanced
between the two, and which should be close to a fifty-fifty mix by next year or
the perhaps the one after. For the
thirteen years I’ve lived beside the river, the fishing has literally been
better every year than the year before.
One thing the river has always had is plenty of fish, but its never been
known for having lots of huge
ones. Even though the Colorado
through the Lower Upper is dam-controlled, none of the dams are close enough to
make the river a tailwater. Twelve to
fourteen inch browns have long been a staple in the Colorado,
but it seems like this year, we’ve caught more and larger fish than ever
before. A twenty inch fish used to be
rare, but this year we’ve already caught a half-dozen, with perhaps two dozen
over sixteen inches being caught.
Even my backyard has become a productive place to fish. The other night,
I was fishing off my dock trying to catch one of the six-inchers shooting out
of the water like Polaris missiles after caddis flies, to transplant into my
wife’s new hydroponics setup. Instead, I caught a sixteen-inch brown on the
size 22 Adams trailing the Elkhair caddis that I was too
lazy to remove. The week before, I was
doing a float trip with a father and son from Mississippi,
and were having a fairly productive day, boating a couple of fish per mile
throughout. When we got to my place, the
son cast a fly toward a fence that runs into the river to keep the dogs
in. The drifting hopper suddenly stopped
near the fence, and he told me later that he thought he’d snagged the fence until
the line began to move. He was using a
tenkara rod, and not being able to let line out, I suddenly had to start rowing hard because now I was the line backing! Only two days earlier, a customer had
hooked a huge brown up in the fast water in the canyon using a tenkara rod, and
we had lost that fish. When that fish
was hooked it ran upstream, and I rowed as hard as I could to stay with it. Then
the fish turned, and came straight at my cataraft shooting between the pontoons
as I leapt to the front of the boat with my net. The fisherman grabbed the leader as the fish
went under, and the tippet broke off.
This time, I was determined to not let that happen again, and we went
round and round in the mellow water of my backyard until the brown finally
tired and we were able to bring him to the net.
After taking a couple of pictures and releasing the fish, father and son
agreed that the behemoth brown caught with a tenkara using 6X tippet was the highlight of their Colorado fishing trip.
But the river was not done with its surprises yet. We continued fishing and at the other end of
my property the son caught another smaller brown, (which after the
twenty-incher looked pathetic). Our trip
was almost over, but just above our takeout is a curving, undercut bank, and
we’ve pulled a couple of huge browns and rainbows from it this year and
last. Just above it, the father broke off
his dropper fly, and I said “Let’s go without it, and just fish the hopper only
along the bank. Without a dropper fly,
its much easier to get a fly close enough to the grass for a big bruiser to see
it”. As I was trimming the tippet off the bend of the hopper’s hook, the son
broke his off while tossing it towards the bank. I said, “Same thing, let’s go with just a hopper.
Try and get the fly as close as possible to the grass”.
I pulled up the anchor, and we began to drift towards the grassy
undercut, and both men made their casts.
Tenkara rods are rigged with a finite amount of line, and can cast only
so far and no more than that. Their first casts were short, so I moved the boat
closer and they cast again. The son’s
hopper was about two feet from the bank, and he said, “How’s that?”, and I
said, “Cast again, we need to get it a little closer”. He raised the fly off the water, and as he
did I gave the boat a gentle twist of my oars, rotating it slightly
counter-clockwise towards the bank. This
time his fly landed about an inch off the grass. “Perfect!” I said, “Keep it RIGHT there!”
With slight adjustments to the oars, we were able to keep that fly an inch off
the bank all the way down. The son kept
arm extended and steady, and together for just that moment we were fishing like
a unit, as one single connected entity. He held the rod, but I controlled the placement and drift of
the fly, with the oars. I was no longer
just a guide, and he the fisherman, but we were both fishing together in that exact moment. Watching the hopper speed along the bank was
mesmerizing. The sun was at our backs
and the whole scene played out as if on stage.
The grass was as green as the Amazonian rainforest, and the hopper
looked as big as a hanging curveball does to David Ortiz. What happened next was obvious, and what
should always happen in a just and right universe. A huge olive snout came up, the hopper
disappeared, and suddenly the twelve foot tenkara rod doubled over as an excited
expression came over the son’s face. I pushed the boat towards the bank which
relieved pressure on the rod, but now we were in the faster current closer to
the bank, and we sped downriver with the son holding his rod up high trying to
keep solid tension on the fish. There
was an eddy behind a big rock coming up on the left bank, so I made for
that. It was a weird balance of rowing
through the current, while keeping one eye on my fisherman and his quarry. We got the boat and the fish out of the fast
water, and I jumped out of the boat with my net. The son steered him into my net from above,
and with that we’d landed our second
huge brown trout in less than a mile!
People who have lived and fished
the Upper C for years can tell stories of the great fishing before Windy Gap
altered the balance of things. They talk
of lots of trout grown fat on the big stonefly hatches of the day. Although that was before my time here in the Centennial
State, I’ve never seen it as good
as it right now, both for the
quantities and now the size of the fish we catch.
It seems like the Colorado River has more big fish
in it than ever. I‘d like to think that its because after five hundred trips
down the river, I’ve finally figured out where they are. But these are almost
all wild fish, and keep their own
counsel. The river has a more powerful
and infinite force than a mere mortal like me can ever hope to really grasp
A river full of wild trout is like a box of
chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. Actually, it’s better than chocolate, since its
pleasures linger in the mind long after a day spent on the water is past. Fall of 2016 is at hand, and this is usually
when the fishing gets really good! If
this past summer is any indication, what’s coming next should be memorable!
Jack
Bombardier
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