Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Enjoying the Red Deer River Tailwater


It sure is warm out there. Many streams have rapidly rising water temperatures. Fortunately, the tailwater of the Red Deer River has relatively stable and low water temperatures thanks to the water from Gleniffer Lake coming from the bottom of the lake that goes down the penstocks and eventually into the Red Deer River! This also allows the first several kilometres to remain ice free in the winter and keeps temperatures down for about 5-8 km below the dam.

As my buddy Phil Nash has pointed out: if the water is real comfortable to stand in without waders: it maybe too warm to fly fish for certain species.

Doug and I had a chance to wander down the Red Deer River looking for brown trout and rocky mountain whitefish. There are times that we connect with walleye although today we were not targeting them.

Lots of Trico and PMD spinners in the air. Some of the fish were sipping them off of the surface. I did hook two browns on a tiny PMD emerger but lost both today!

We did connect with plenty of rockies. They are such a forgiving fish and give an excellent account of themselves.

Doug and I looked for risers but we really concentrated on looking for structure in the river. Depressions, riffle-drops, rocks and changing current speeds helped us locate fish!

We called it a day at 1 pm. We implemented our own Hoot Owl Restrictions.


Spinners



The driver of this jet boat did it right by moving to the edge and throttling down.  Check out the wake from the jet boat! We appreciated not getting swamped.


Concentration








 

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