Down to the Last Week to Fly Fish the Eastern Slopes

Halloween is the last day our Eastern Slope rivers are open. We are down to the last 9 days that we can fly fish for cutthroat trout! Where has the time gone? This last week, Karen and I have been tied up with family. We did manage to get out today, it wasn't the best weather day but were able to make a mad dash for the Eastern Slopes. We had to bundle up with warm clothes. The temperature was -1C when we started and climbed up to 7C.

The river was gin clear although it did seem to be up a bit! That may have been due to the warm weather that melted snow we have had the last few days. We did have a chinook arch overhead and luckily the wind stayed away!

We did not see many mayflies. It seemed to be a perfect day for Blue Winged Olives but we saw just a few floating down the runs that we fly fished. Well we nymphed. We nymphed a lot using big wiggle worms down to size 20 brassies. We tried a lot of combinations today as well as several different nymphing strategies. At one point, we thought today we were going to get skunked. Several easily visible cutts were not moving for any of our offerings. 

Our best set up was a wiggle worm with a small size 18 red brassie trailing behind. The cutts did become active for a short period of time and that is quite typical for late fall fly fishing for cutts. We did get down to 5x tippet and that helped as well.

Today was a great reminder that cutthroat trout will get quite lethargic as the water temperatures drop. The window for active cutts shrinks to later in the morning until mid afternoon! We still had an excellent day. We hooked about a dozen today!

We packed up around 3 pm so we could negotiate the muddy road back to the black top in the daylight. 

I hope we are able to mange one more trip out before Halloween.

 

A Blast from the Past

A Lake Wabamun monster pike from a few years back. Larry and I were running the camera boat for a television show with Phil Rowley and Michael Short! Michael caught a monster pike on camera and then after we finished getting footage for the show, Larry caught this monster along a weed line. He saw "nervous water" and he cast his bunny leech into the fray and this monster grabbed his fly! What a moment!

 

Chasing Rainbows Under a Chinook Arch

Another well defined chinook arch was stretched across the western horizon this morning. The best part was the 10C weather at 8 am. It has been -10C a lot lately as the sun rose. Not today!

After our morning run, we dashed out to a local lake. There were just two boats on the water! That was an added bonus! Once Karen and I loaded up the pram, we motored out to talk to Doug Pullan. Just as we got there, the fly fishing started to pick up too!

Our first rainbow was full of shrimp! You can see the throat sample just above!  Can you see the pregnant shrimp? That motivated Karen and I to head to the edges and fly fish just off of the edges. We had an awesome afternoon tangling with many rainbows. Doug was consistently tangling with decent sized rainbows too! That made for an excellent afternoon!

We were fully expecting to get a blast of wind from the the chinook overhead but it never happened. 

This is another interesting throat sample that Doug retrieved from a rainbow. Baby damsels, bloodworms and shrimp. A very typical menu in the fall. We fished 4 to 6 feet below a strike indicator with our shrimp and leech imposters. That worked well. We often cast and retrieve when shrimp is on the menu over weed beds.