Backcountry Brookie Bonanza

Karen and I laced up our hiking boots yesterday and walked a bit over to 10 km into one of our favourite lakes to chase brook trout! We have visited this area many times in Banff National Park! Remember you have to have a National Park Fishing License if you fish in the National Parks. We were lucky too. The weather was cool. We saw frost on one of the bridges. The wind even behaved itself. The brookies were all dressed up for Fall too! After the two hour hike (we hike a good clip), we strung up our rods. We fly fished with chubby chernobyls for the 5 hours that we were at the lake. The brookies would rise up and smash our chernobyls. It was amazing. We were also impressed by the quality of the brookies. 

The 11 km hike out seemed longer than the trek in but we had smiles on our face after an outstanding day.

Yesterday was special. We both loved the hike and the beautiful place we were in. We are lucky to have such gems in Canada.

Take a look!

Chernobyls

Frost!!!

 

Fall is in the Air

Fall is definitely in the air! Cooler mornings, shorter daylight hours, leaves turning vibrant colours and most importantly water temperatures coming down. As water temperatures drop, the trout will ramp up their feeding in preparation for winter.  One of my favourite times occurs when the boatman/backswimmer activity ramps up! I have seen light activity the last two times out. I have caught a few trout on Ultimate Boatman and Rinse and Repeat fly patterns. Oh, the video of how to tie a Rinse and Repeat Backswimmer will be out in the next few days! Get out there when you can!

 

Rocky Mountain Whitefish on the Red Deer River

Rocky Mountain Whitefish are usually not on the radar of fly fisherman. Karen and I love to chase rockies, especially on the Red Deer River. Today we decided to spend a few hours trying to catch whites. We had a blast too! The river flows are near perfect! We wandered to a run where we have found rockies in the past. We rigged up with Wiggle Worms and Rainbow Warriors. We have had a lot of success with that combination before. We fly fished through the run extensively and caught nothing. Hmm, what to do. We decided that maybe our flies are not deep enough so we decided to add split shot. We usually set our strike indicator at about 2 to 2.5 times the depth of the water. We went a bit deeper. Well we started to connect with rockies after we added the third and fourth split shot onto our leader. Finally we were in the zone. Lots of mending helps the flies sink down too! 

Where do you find rocky mountain whitefish?  Riffle water and a riffle with a drop. The surprise of the day occurred when Karen decided to fly fish with Lance Egan's Blow Torch. The whitefish certainly liked to chase this fly. Often, all you need is a Wiggle Worm and a size 16,  Rainbow Warrior.

Blow Torch (Lance Egan)

Karen did connect on a decent brown trout today. It shook off but browns will certain respond to these nymphs. 

Rocky Mountain Whitefish are definitely worthy adversaries, give it a try!

The Golden Stone hatch on the RDR must have been decent this year!