When I poured myself a cup of coffee this morning, it was 3C at the Red Deer Regional Airport. Hmm, that made me smile. Overnight temperatures are definitely dropping to a point where our local lake water will slowly cool down at night. I am always concerned with water temperatures. Yesterday Karen and I drove out to a local lake to fly fish. Well we were not really sure we would fly fish if the water temperature was too high. The first thing we did was get out a thermometer and check water temperature. It was 67F on the surface. We decided to fly fish but no fish would be out of the water for more than 5 seconds for a quick picture. We also beefed up our tippet a bit so any caught trout were landed in a timely fashion. We kept our expectations low and we were pleasantly surprised with our success. The interesting thing was we were catching trout 3 to 5 feet below the surface. That surprised both of us. I talked to a fish biologist yesterday who said trout will adapt to water temperatures (to a point). The trout we caught yesterday didn't swim away, they bolted away with a feisty kick! We stopped fly fishing at 1 pm. The surface temperatures were edging on too high for our liking so we called it a day!
Do carry a thermometer in your kit.
If you are hitting your favourite lake, go early and monitor water temperature. My good friend Phil Rowley did an interesting water temperature check. Phil monitored water temperature at different depths. Some lakes definitely had a thermocline where water temperatures dropped a lot, in other lakes, the water temperature was almost uniform throughout the water column. Phil steered away from the lakes with the uniform water temperature, they were way too warm.
We also found a moderate chironomid hatch too. That was fun!
This time of the year I like to anticipate the water boatmen/ backswimmer activity. These little morsels are loved by both the trout and fly fishermen. Better get at the vice and stock up on your backswimmers and boatmen flies.
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