July 4th, 2009Good times on the Taylor! Our great friends Ben and Bre were up for the 4th weekend and Ben never misses a chance to hit the water for a few. Since it was mostly a social weekend we knew our fishing time would be relegated to the hours when no one else is alive yet (i.e. we couldn't cut into "hang-out time" with the girls). So, we got up at 6 AM and headed up to the C and R for 3 hours.
Unfortunately, we beat the sun and it was pretty cold with no visibility for the first 45 minutes, to top it off there was fog and some pretty strong winds at 8:30 AM. Much to our happiness, the sun hit the river, the fog burnt off and the wind died completely.
The fish were moving pretty hard, and I'm not afraid to admit when I'm getting schooled. It was schooled in a good way though. It's one thing to fish the C and R with high winds, no sun and not catch any fish. In those situations I just feel cheated because without a few variables going your way the only way to catch fish is lots of weight in the deep holes (not my favorite sport). In this case, I feel like I was bested by a worthy opponent when I can see the fish feeding but am just not getting the right pattern in front of them. It's like a meeting of the minds, but I'll be back again to win the next round.
I may be misleading though, we still did really good for 2 hours of prime fishing. I landed my big fish (bad photo, I had some camera issues) on a grey midge, size #24, and another nice rainbow on a mysis. Ben landed this gorgeous brown on the grey midge also. We both landed a couple of other small fish.All in all, I think the fish that were schooling me were taking something like a size #32 cream midge. I did some subsurface watching and surface watching and a micro cream midge was really all that was in the water/air that morning. I even tried a #28 cream midge and got one of my targets to strike at it, but missed him.
-Jeff
That's a decent size fish you got there...camera issues or not. Boy, I sure do LOVE that river...need to make it back out.
ReplyDeleteAnd next time, I want to try a mysis pattern - I have never fished one of those. How sad is that? Since the last time I've been there, I've done some research and have tied up a few prototypes, which I am anxious to try out.
Not too sad at all really. It's ironic ... I live 40 minutes from the Taylor C and R and that is the first real day I've ever fished a mysis (I pretty much had a goal that I was going to catch a fish on a mysis).
ReplyDeleteI fish mysis all the time at Frying Pan (because you can see them drifting downstream a lot), but at the Taylor I'm almost always using midge or baetis patterns. In fact, that rainbow refused a mysis 3 or 4 times and took my midge on like the 8th drift.
I think the key to Taylor mysis is to hit it just after they've pumped up the flows. Then the dam is pumping out large quantities of mysis.