Oh man, we are down to the last few weeks of fly fishing on the eastern slopes. The shadows are getting long and the window of opportunity to connect with with our prized west slope cutthroat is getting small. Doug, Karen and I decided to fly fish a very popular cutthroat river. We made a trek well downstream to fly fish! We arrived and started to walk at 9 am and the air temperature was a frosty -6C. The standing water was frozen almost 2 inches thick already!
The fly fishing started off slow but as the day warmed, so did the action! Cutthroat have started to move into wintering holes and they are not as spread out as they are in the summer. The cutties have seen a lot of flies this year. We fished mostly with tiny flies like Charlie Craven's Poison Tung and brassies. We did use larger heavily weighted Euro Nymphs at times to get deep quickly.
5 Poison Tungs on a dime
The day was beautiful and we caught a decent number of cutthroat!
Sadly, we encountered a LOT of evidence of poaching on our prized river today. Fish entrails just tossed in the river. I caught a cutthroat with a bait hook deeply taken down the throat. I was able to cut the 15 pound line back. Not likely that this cutthroat will survive. It is sad to see a complete lack of respect for our prized waters and our regulations.
We are past educating people about protecting our waters. The fines have to stiffer and enforcement officers have to have more of a presence. It certainly took the edge off of a beautiful day!
Now it is time to get the 2 inches of dust out of the truck!
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