Foul Hooked

I kept using the same yellow streamer with the green rubber legs but after a half hour with no strikes I switched to a black, rabbit fur streamer. I am always experimenting with different flies and trying to find some new ones in which to gain confidence. I placed another small split shot above the streamer so I could probe the depths of the deeper holes. Even though I had caught the last two large trout in the shallow riffles, I know there has got to be large fish in the deep holes in this section of the river.

By now it is time to start working my way back upstream. The next stretch has what looks like a nice deep section next to a long section of flat shallow water. I cast up above where the best spot to target would be so the fly will have time to sink into the deeper portion of the pool. Right as it passes the deepest part, the fly suddenly stops, but doesn’t move. I can feel resistance on the line but can’t tell if it is a snag or a big fish. Suddenly it moves but stays deep. It never makes a long run but is really fighting hard to stay in the deep water. I let it fight for a few minutes to tire it out before trying to bring it to the net. Finally I pull it close enough to tell it is a big brown that is foul hooked on its dorsal fin. Fish that are foul hooked are real tough to land. I am very careful to bring him closer very smoothly. Any sudden jerks and the hook may come out. I scoop the net underneath him just as the hook comes loose. Luckily I had the net under him just in time. He is not a calm fish. He is fighting even though he is loose from the hook and is in the net. I set the net with him in it on the shore. As I go to take a picture, he jumps completely into the air. What an amazing fighter. Doing all this jumping around has covered him in dead grass so I put him back into the net and place the net in the water. This washes him off so I can get a decent picture. He measures 19 inches. Not as big as the last fish but still longer than the net, excluding the handle. What an amazing evening. Three fish 17 inches and longer.

While changing out of my waders I talked to the sheep rancher. He says “great weather, I guess any day fishing is better than working.” I explained to him that I had put in a full day of work and that I just stopped by the river on the way home. I told him the river was a little higher than last week and slightly off color. He told me there is a small stream that flows through town that is high and dumping a lot of mud into the river. I guess this is to be expected with the warmer spring weather. Hopefully I can get in another day or two of fabulous fishing before the real runoff starts.

The Twenty Incher

When I hook a fish I try to guide it to where it will cause the least amount of disturbance to the best part of the section of river in which I’m fishing. If there is one nice fish in a hole, there may be another. If this lie was a good enough spot that a 17 inch brown would take up residence there, why not another? That is what I did after hooking that last brown I discussed in “Streamer Fishing In The Riffles.” When I first hooked the fish, I didn’t let him go to the deep part of the pool I was going to target fishing next, instead I pulled him into the slack side water that I had already disturbed moments before. My next couple of casts were just past where I hooked the 17 incher. Surprisingly, I get another hard strike. This fish immediately jumps out of the water and I can tell it is even bigger than the previous one. It takes off downstream and jumps a couple more times. OK, this time I think all the fish in this pool are spooked.

After a good fight and I can tell the fish is tiring, I pinch the line against the rod handle with my right hand. I raise the rod to slide the fish along the top of the water into the net that I’ve positioned with my outstretched left hand. The fish is so big he hardly fits in the net. I lay it down on some soft grass next to the bank and I pull him out of the net to measure…20 inches. This is a gorgeous, well fed fish! He had no problem swimming quickly away as I set him in the calm water next to the shore.

Streamer Fishing In The Riffles

The red dirt road has dried from the rains two days previous. The car temperature gauge reads 59 degrees. What a great spring day. No jacket required! And there is only one car at the access ladder. I leave the yellow streamer tied on from the previous trip and fish my way downstream, casting to the far bank and stripping it across stream as it is carried by the current downstream.

After forty minutes, my shoulder muscles start to hurt and not having caught a trout yet, I remember why I usually nymph fish. When nymphing I can usually catch a few fish in the first forty minutes. Secondly, there are a lot fewer casts. Streamer fishing is fast fishing. You are not casting upstream and letting the nymph float back slowly downstream in drag-free fashion, but rather casting across to the opposite bank, making a few quick strips and immediately casting again. Repeating this every couple of seconds makes for a lot of quick, forceful casts. Arms can get tired quite fast doing this. Nevertheless, the potential is there for large trout. This, of course, keeps me casting away.

I place a small split shot at the head of the streamer and make sure I work each of the deep holes. Voila, after forty-five minutes and hundreds of casts later, I’m rewarded. Wouldn’t you know it; I get a hit in the shallow riffles, not in the deep holes which I was targeting. My first thought is “at least I didn’t get skunked.” After forty minutes without a strike you begin to wonder: Am I using the right fly? Are the fish biting? Is the water too cloudy or too high? Anyway, hooking this big fish on a streamer makes my day. What’s more, he jumps a couple of times and puts up a good fight. This is why I come out to the stream.

I reach back and grab the handle of my net and with a yank, detach it from the magnet. The fish takes out line again, which makes it difficult because now I’ve got the net in one hand, the pole in the other. I need to reel in the big brown that is taking out line. I contemplate throwing the net on the shore. But then I’d be left without the net. I awkwardly reel in line with the net still in my hand. Then I lift the rod high to bring the fish close enough to slide it into the net in my outstretched hand. Whoa, this is a nice fish. Not as big as the one I caught last week but definitely a nice fish. I go to take the hook out and the trout starts squirming. The hook is actually in quite deep and the fish was well hooked. This is another thing I like about these big hooks. Once you get a fish hooked, the hooks usually don’t slip out like the little midge hooks sometimes do. As I take a picture, the fish seems to say “I’m not going to take this laying down!” The fish is about 17 inches long and is happy to be placed back into the water.

Yellow Streamers

After I went to all the effort of switching the strike indicator setup and switching to caddis imitations, guess what happened. I caught a couple of fish and then hooked a bush on the other side of the river. Now usually the water is not so deep that I can’t wade a little deeper and un-hook my terminal tackle. This time, however, the water was much too deep. I pulled the line hard enough that I lost my whole terminal rig including both flies. I had caught enough fish on nymphs for the evening and it would be getting dark in an hour. I tied on a large, yellow streamer and decided to work my way back upstream.

It’s fun to see brown trout jump out of the water chasing a streamer. In fact, sometimes streamer fishing can be quite visual. One trout jumped twice trying to catch the streamer and missed both times. I wondered if I was stripping too fast. Another time, I cast the streamer into the deep water right next to a rock. Immediately a fish hit it right at the surface but didn’t hook up. Again I wondered if I was pulling the streamer too fast. I will experiment with stripping speeds. The next hole I encountered was caused by a bunch of large logs and lumber. This time I purposely made sure I was working the streamer a little slower. I let the fly sink a bit and started slowly stripping it in. A huge trout darted out of the depths and I could see it avoid hitting the fly from behind and swinging around to hit it from the side at the front of the streamer. I waited until it hit the fly and I lifted the rod. He immediately darted back into the depths from where he had come. I held tight and made sure he couldn’t go in far enough to snag the line on the logs. After a few seconds I was able to work it out of the depths and out of the log jam. This time he headed downstream but I was able to keep him working the tension on the line and eventually moved him into the shallow water were I could pull it onto the shore. I immediately measured him since he looked so big. It only measured 18 and ¾ inches. Its big head and broad girth sure made him look big. What a gorgeous fish!

Stomach Pump

After replacing the 90 degree angle Fish Pimp setup with the regular straight setup, which they ought to call the 180 degree setup, I caught a brown about 14 inches long. Periodically I like to check what the trout have been eating recently so I use a stomach pump. A stomach pump is a suction bulb with a plastic tube attached. It ought to be called a throat pump because it suctions out what is in the trout’s throat, not its stomach. This lets you know what it has most recently eaten. To use a stomach pump, squeeze the bulb, fill the device with water then squeeze some water out to leave the bulb slightly indented so it can pull a suction. Gently push the tube of the stomach pump into the fish’s mouth and barely into the throat. Let go of the indented bulb and check that it forms a suction with the trout’s throat. Pull the device slowly out of its mouth and the throat contents should move up into the tube. Carefully let the fish go in some calm water. If you need to hold the trout in the water a moment for it to gain its strength and balance, go ahead. The insects in the stomach pump can wait. Next, squeeze the bulb to expel the contents onto a surface where you can examine them. This can be your palm, a flat rock or some kind of container. I have in the past prepared small bottles with a 50/50 mixture of glycerol and alcohol in order to store the insects.

This particular day the fish had been eating, most noticeably, bright green caddis pupa. It also had been eating brown-grey scuds, midge pupa and mayfly nymphs. As usual, there was no flying insects that dry flies would be needed to imitate. I had been nymphing with midge pupa and mayfly nymph imititations, which had been working adequately and were consistent with the trout’s recent diet. Nevertheless, I was curious about the larger, easier to see, bright green caddis pupae. I switched to a size 20 green caddis nymph imitation and a size 16 emerging caddis imitation. As you can imagine, I immediately caught another brown, as well as my first white fish of the day.

I usually select the medium size trout (12 to 16 inches) to obtain a throat sample. I do not want to risk taking the time to collect a sample with a large brown. With the large trout I hurry to get a picture and get them right back into the water for release. One thing I have also tried to do is to get a sample from a white fish. My thinking here is to avoid having to sample the trout all together and just sample a big white fish. This doesn’t work. For some reason you can’t get a suction with the white fish and therefore can’t collect a specimen. This is puzzling to me and I keep trying every so often.

Fish Pimp Evaluation

Thursday’s forecast was that the day would be the warmest it had been all year. Kind of the opposite of the last time I went out. The night before, I had rigged up with a size 22 WD-40 and a size 22 Rainbow Warrior. The last time I had hit the Weber River this combination worked well. This time, however, I rigged a large Fish Pimp strike indicator in the dead drift/90 degree angle method.
This was done by (before tying on the flies) threading the leader through the rubber tubing and threading the leader through the hole that had been drilled on the side of the indicator. Then sliding these two items up to the desired spot on the leader and stretching the tubing (with the line inside) so it will fit along the slit the whole way. This will form a loop in the leader going down through the hole.

Even with the great weather, there was not another car parked near the access point. Sometimes I hear complaints about the crowds on the river, but it always amazes me on a day with such great weather and a river with excellent fishing that there aren’t more people out. I hiked down river quite a ways so I could fish my way back up stream. I started out with one BB split shot and the large indicator seemed to float just fine. After a few casts I caught a real small, 4 or 5 inch brown. It is good to see future generations of trout doing well in the river. The hooking of this fish caused the loop of leader on the indicator to pull through and free the indicator to slide down the line. I didn’t realize this for a couple of casts and wondered why the indicator was so close to the flies. I slipped the tube and indicator back up the leader and re-placed them where I wanted. After catching a few more fish I realized it was a pain to have to re-rig the indicator after every fish. Now if I wasn’t catching many fish this may be OK, but hopefully, this isn’t the case. When I added another split shot because I wanted to fish some deeper water the indicator stayed afloat, sort of. As long as the split shot didn’t tap the bottom it stayed afloat, but as the sinkers tapped the bottom the indicator would go underwater. Never the less, I still caught a few more browns from the deeper water.

Next I tried the large Fish Pimp without the 90 degree angle setup. In order to do this I had to cut off both flies, and take off the two split shot. This is a pain to do. After tying on two new flies and placing the split shot back on, I placed the indicator on the leader. This is done by sliding the leader into the slit on the indicator, taking the tubing and twisting it once or twice and stretching it at the same time, placing it into the indicator’s slit. This will then hold the indicator in place. This worked well and I didn’t have to reposition the indicator after every fish. I do like the fact that with either method, the Fish Pimp doesn’t kink the line.

Zorro Strikes Again

Friday was a cold and windy day. A storm was coming in and should be just right for fishing. With day light savings time, I can leave work, hit the river on the way home and get in a couple hours fishing before dark. It wasn’t supposed to start
snowing until 8:00. I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head to protect my ears from the cold wind. I was using my 9 foot, 4 weight LL Sage this time but still using size 22 nymphs, a midge emerger and a WD-40. I put on one BB size split and a small Fish Pimp strike indicator that I had purchased at the Sportsmen’s Expo. The indicator was constantly being pulled under the water by the weight of the split shot and it was tough to detect a strike. After a few minutes of this I put on a large Fish Pimp. On the first cast I hooked a nice size brown. It fought hard in the fast current but as I got him close to shore, he managed to get off. I worked my way downstream and as I got to some deeper holes I added a second split shot. The large Fish Pimp wasn’t able to keep afloat with the two BB size split shots so I switched to a medium size thingamabobber. I will experiment more with the Fish Pimps on other trips when it isn’t so cold and windy. I ended up catching a few more browns and one white fish.

My last and largest brown was caught in fast, shallow water right next to deeper water near a bend. The trout had a scar on its side that looked like it had been hit by Zorro. I don’t recall any episodes of Zorro where he had taken up fly fishing.

The Sportsman’s Expo

Every year about the middle of March the Sportsman’s Expo is held at the South Town Expo Center. This is a fun event worth going to for any outdoor sportsman. Every year I find something new that makes the visit worth it.

For a couple of years I brought my daughter Madison and we got our pictures taken holding baby bears. Her favorite thing was the roasted almonds.

Last year I took Karen. She got a free camo T-shirt and loved the big trucks.

You can get brochures from outdoor agencies. The brochures give me a couple of month’s worth of reading material. I always make sure I get the Fishing regulations for Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

I usually pick up a couple of duffle bags. One year when Sara’s family was here I brought up a big duffle bag to give her husband Nick for father’s day. Little Nick and Lilly took turns getting inside it. It was also the perfect bag to take to Yellowstone. I bought a smaller, camo duffle bag last year that I use for all my trips. Of course, at the Expo they always give you great “show” prices.

One year, I was talking to the Hyde Drift Boats sales rep and found out that the show prices for new boats were the same price as the used boats that I had been considering. So, of course I bought a drift boat at these great “show” prices.

One of the most unusual things I have bought at the show was an alligator head. I gave it to my son Gary, but when he got married he gave it back. It will make a great décor for my new fly fishing den.


This year Jon and I met up at the show. Fish Pimp (A brand of strike indicator) had a booth and were giving away free baseball hats if you bought some Fish Pimps at one of their distributors. I also picked up some coupons for great deals on guided Green River Fishing Trips from the Flaming Gorge Lodge. I have used their guide serving before and have really enjoyed floating the river with a guide. I will write about those trips in a future blog.