Lonely Bass And Crowded Trout

A Great Day On The Water!

I spent the last couple of days doing an early Summer tour of the waters, to see where I should spend more time and where I will be wasting it. Well, the report has come in! The bass are lonely, all by themselves and hard to find. We caught one bass in total, right around 7:00 at night. We had fished quite a bit before that, so it wasn't great. That one single bass was at Wonderland Lake, which has also risen about three feet. Pella Crossing only produced one fish, and it didn't even get all the way in. Since it was a big fish, I already had the headlines running through my mind. "Jay Zimmerman's Backstabber Proves Successful On Large Bass." Well it did, but I didn't. The fish popped of after a couple minutes of fighting. So with that day done, the outlook was bleak. Oh, and did I mention all the carp were two hundred feet off the shore? Ya, crazy. So after having a late dinner, watching TV, and doing a book burning of all our schoolwork, we went to bed. I woke up the next morning, hoping this day would be better. My friend had a tennis tourney in the morning, so I stayed home and tied flies. He got home, and we went up the Boulder Canyon. I mean, bass just wasn't an option anymore. I might as well cast in my yard at that rate. So up Boulder Canyon we were. I'd say we got up around noon, and it was looking good. The water looked something like this:

Lookin' Nice Above Boulder Falls!

My first cast was in, to no success. My fifth cast, however, proved it had the right drift. The fish at the top of the post was produced on a Blue Poison Tung. I caught a couple more fish, including a really miniscule brown that's pictured at the bottom. After that tiny thing, though, I caught the biggest fish of the trip. A beautiful, colored, fat rainbow was in the net:

Big Boy Rainbow

I released the fish, who allowed us to take another picture as he swam off. A couple more nice browns, but then a disaster struck. Or should I say, a could-have-been disaster. I ran out of Blue Poison Tungs! So I had to decide a new pattern to tie on. And then something little and red fell out of my box. What was that? A sign? Yes, indeed it was! The "Alien Shit" was sitting neatly on top of a rock. So I tied it on, and put my first cast into a small pocket. Bam! This brown was sitting by the bank ten seconds later, with the Alien in it's mouth:

"I liked the Red Fly, So I Ate It. Ya, I knew It Was a Fly, But It Was So Pretty!"

So here is one of those other Browns I talked about earlier, and the last picture of that big Rainbow swimming away. All in all, a great day out there!

Bye-Bye, Buddy!

A Solid Boulder Creek Brown