Taking the Shocker to Cody Canal

So The Wife and I ended up in Cody for a couple days this past week. For those who have never made the trip, Cody is well worth a visit--especially after the tourist season is over.

We wandered around the Sierra Trading Post Outlet, lamenting the dearth of smoking deals that once proliferated throughout their catalogs. We ate at the Wyoming Rib & Chop House, enjoying one of the best jambalaya dishes around until discovering the havoc it can wreck on your GI tract. I'd order it again. The Wife, not so much. In the morning, we ate breakfast in the shadow of Buffalo Bill at the historic Irma Hotel--a must see. If there is one place that screams old Wyoming, this is it.

After breakfast and a few hours of work, The Wife and I headed out to help the local Trout Unlimited chapter with their fish rescue project. Each irrigation season, thousands and thousands of fish are diverted from the local rivers into a complex network of canals. In the fall, when the irrigation districts shut down their diversions and the canals dry up, these fish become raccoon food.

Thanks to the devoted efforts of local trout eccentrics, some of these otherwise lost fish are trapped with electro-fishers and returned to their home streams. For the half-day that The Wife and I helped, we rescued around 270 trout. These fish varied from a six inch cutthroat to a brown trout around 25 inches, and everything in between. The day before we arrived, they shocked up a 29 inch brown. Ridiculous.

While I did a great job manning the electro-fisher, I did an exceptionally poor job manning the camera. Once I convince some of the locals to share their pictures, I'll update this post a bit...

Fishing Notes

I got out fishing last Saturday. Despite the recent snows, the weather has been quite nice and it seemed like the perfect time to rip big streamers for big brown trout. With the emphasis on big, I promptly tied on a small parachute mayfly that required binoculars to see once it hit the water and caught two smallish fish. On the other hand, my fishing partner for the day, Russ, managed to stick with the original plan of going big and was rewarded with a gorgeous fish. Yup, I am in fact a sucker for dry flies...

As it turns out, I wasn't the only one to go fishing this past weekend. The Brother of the Blog got out on one of his nearby rivers and, although he has no photographic evidence, claims to have caught a coho with his fly rod. My normal skepticism with this sort of thing was brushed aside quickly once I recalled that Josh could be the luckiest angler in the world. He accomplishes things with a fly rod through sheer happenstance that I could only do with a lifetime of practice and persistence like the world has never seen. Regardless, those coastal Oregon streams sure are epic...

Another great day on the water...

Holy cow it's been a long time since I posted anything on here... Gunahaftodobetter.

Instead of trying to recap the last month, I'm just going to pick things up like I never left...

The Wife and I got out fishing a bit on Sunday. It was a beautiful day, with just a hint of fall in the air. As you can tell, the water was crystal clear. We had been fishing this place off and on for the past couple months using mostly hoppers. After getting to the river around 3:00ish, there were hundreds of grasshoppers clicking about along with the occasional PMD mayfly spinners or caddis fly.

Not seeing any fish on the surface, we tied on a couple hopper-dropper rigs and got to fishing. The fishing was slower than it had been in the past, but persistence pays off. We caught a few Yellowstone cutthroat, a lost brown trout and the occasional whitefish.

I think this river may have been straightened back in the day. Much of the river is riffled and fairly shallow. To fish it, you end up hiking quite a ways, picking the best spots to cast while walking past the rest. We usually end up covering about 2 miles per day of fishing, and this day was no different.

The Wife got into a few fish too.
After fishing for a number of hours, we finally decided to turn back and head for the truck. However, with the sun starting its descent, we still had one more super sweet run to fish before calling it a day. We started fishing the run with our hopper-dropper rig and caught a couple fish, but then it happened. All of a sudden, we began to hear the sweet slurp of big fish taking small flies on the surface.

After a mild excitement-induced heart attack--not too dissimilar from the several heart attacks I experienced watching the Oregon Ducks trying to lose to Purdue the day before--I changed my fly to a small, size 16 light cahill similar to the mayflies we saw earlier. Oh yeah, we caught fish:
The last 1 1/2 hours of fishing was amazing. I caught this toad pretty quick after changing flies and numerous others followed. Kinda wish I'd moved my ugly mits out of the way because this fish had AMAZING color.

At one point The Wife missed what she thought was a large brown trout. Knowing that there could be truly huge fish in this river I tied on a big black streamer about 5 inches long after losing my light cahill. I cast across the current and began stripping in. On the first cast, a huge fish hit my fly. A split second later, my leader was toast and the fish was free. To Karta's excitement, it still jumped a couple times trying to throw my now detached fly. Without another black streamer like the one I just lost, I tied on a white one. After watching a large fish follow it for a few casts, I finally hooked lip and landed a couple cutthroat from 15-18 inches. Not nearly as large as the fish I lost...

As always, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Toasty

After talking with Josh a little ago and hearing about his snorkeling adventures on the Umpqua River in Oregon, The Wife and I decided we would pick up a cheap mask a snorkel, pack the fly rods and head up into the mountains for a little river fun.

It's a good thing we brought the mask and snorkel because, much to our surprise, the place we first stopped was full of suckers and didn't appear to have a trout for miles. Coincidentally, it's a good thing we waited to break out the camera because, not at all to my surprise, my farmer's tan is still in record form and has shown negligible improvement. After reassessing the situation and allowing our retinas time to recover from my paleness, we decided to head farther upriver in search of more trout-friendly water temperatures.

We had fished, and caught fish from, this particular stream before. In fact, I posted a few pictures from this small stream before and this was one of the streams I fished with Dad and Josh when the herd was out on their vacation. I'd elaborate on how well Dad and I did on that day, but I would hate to make Josh look bad...

Looking back on our pictures, it appears that I am much better at showing Karta a good day on the river than I am at catching fish.

We found a few small brown trout, but never got into anything with any size--probably should have gone even farther upstream.

The Wife putting on a clinic:

Karta taking it all in:

Driving home after once again reaffirming the fact that trout are smarter than we give them credit for, we got a pretty good view of the wildfire smoke from up near Cody and Yellowstone.

Been Fishing...?

...Oh yeah.

I suppose I won't get any sympathy if I was to complain about carpal tunnel syndrome, but I've been whipping the old fly rod around a bit recently.

Although I have no pictures to prove it, I ended up in the Salmon River country of Idaho a couple weeks ago and ripped some lip. River levels were still quite high, but I found a ton of small juvenile steelhead/rainbow, a decent cutthroat and a bunch of whitefish. Nothing huge, but lots of fun.

Last week, The Wife and I ended up on the North Platte and got to spend a day floating in a drift boat. The river levels were starting to drop down to more normal base flows and the bite was on. A special thanks to Tony and Jan for the great day on the river.

As usual, the first fish is the most difficult. Also as usual, it flopped out of my hand before a good picture could be taken, but here is fish number one--a 17 inchish rainbow. To foreshadow things to come, it gave a very light take on a peacock stonefly nymph.





Here's Jan playing one of her fish. They often use these personal rafts. They seemed to be a very convenient way to navigate the river. Even has room for the dog on the back.

We caught fish like this all day long...

The Wife even got in on the action...

A little brown trout...

And the big fish of the day...

All in all, a very nice day on the river.

More recently, as in yesterday and last night, The Wife and I (and Karta) went small-stream fishing and camped out. It had been an eternity since The Wife had been camping and I was starting to get an ear full for it.

Karta LOVES fishing. Although she also loves swimming, it's pretty easy to keep her out of the water when fishing. So long as I'm catching fish on a somewhat consistent basis, she is happy sitting next to me, watching the fly float by and hoping for the opportunity to sniff a fish. And I do mean watching the fly float by. She figured out the importance of the fly in catching fish long ago.

The reward, at least as far as Karta is concerned...

More fishing...


And the campsite...

A little slow

Well, I got out fishing again for a few hours yesterday evening. After missing two fish, I finally got a small brown, about 12 inches, to net on the same black stonefly imitation I was fishing last Saturday. Although the weather, time of day, and personal incompetence may have played a role in my low catch rate, I'll blame the fact that The Wife probably used all our household's good fish karma last weekend. Either that, or I shouldn't have left the dog at home.

The First Pictures of my Wife on the Internet

So we finally got out, after weeks away from water. As usual, I had the river figured out within the first hour or so.* And, as the pattern of these things go, my wife still caught the big one.

Everything started according to plan though. Invitation to fish private water with a good friend within 45 minutes of town - check. Wake up to a few new inches of snow - well, check. Drive out of snow and into sunshine - much better.
See epic wildlife on the way to the river - check. Yup, it's a moose ladies and gentlemen. Furry canine in tow with exceptionally long tongue - oh yeah.

We were set to fish Cow Pond Creek**, a tailwater that flows into the Still Atmosphere River** about 40 miles out of town. About a week or two ago, the local ranchers ramped up the flows for irrigation season but the water was clear so we thought there might be a few hungry/foolish fish around.
We were right, I caught the first fish after changing to a large black stonefly immitation:
I ended up catching a few more nice browns, but my good nature eventually won out and I relinquished my last stonefly imitation to The Wife.
We fished around in a really nice riffle/run for a bit before moving on upstream. The water was nice and clear so you could see the good lies in the riffle as darker blue water. After struggling with strong wind, heavy flies and wind-resistant strike indicators, The Wife switched over to dry flies and tied on a stimulator. After missing the first fish, The Wife got into a Lunker. She fought it for a short while before landing it and getting this smile maker:
All in all, a very nice day on the water. Thanks, Mr. Cupcakes.
* Those who have fished with me before will recognize this as sarcasm. Those who were fishing with me on this occasion will recognize this as a lie.
** Place names have been changed to protect the innocent.