I fished 3 places: 1) Black Canyon of the Gunnison; 2) the Rio Grande near South Fork; and 3) the Valles Calderas in the Jemez Mountains of NM.
GUNNISON
The Black Canyon is one of the most remote canyons in the US. Now a National Park, it is a "wilderness area", which means no motors and nothing left behind. We did a 2 night, 2.5 day drift, camping each night. Most of the fishing was from the rafts: You'd pop a cast into likely looking pockets near the bank - with a hopper/dropper combination. The closer to the bank the better. Sometimes a fish would take your fly.... most medium size 11-14", a few bigger, 16"+, and, every once and a while, a monster. The Gunnison, due to whirling disease, is now almost exclusively a brown trout fishery (it used to be dominantly rainbows). The few 'bows that survive were adults when whirling disease hit, are 7+ years old, and are now enormous.
At times, we'd get out of the boats and fish from the banks.
"Chuck and chance" fishing isn't normally my favorite. But the need for precision casting redeemed it somewhat: you often flashed by these pockets as you drifted by. And it seems that if you could hit the edge water in the more remote, harder to reach pockets, you had the best chance to catch a nice fish. So it was fast and furious: spot a hole, shoot a cast next to the bank, watch for a strike, pull off as you flew by on the drift, spot another hole, cast... all in a continual rhythm. It was fun but tiring... I'm not used to casting 100 times/hour, but that's what this was.
I caught a lot of fish... mostly fat and feisty 12" browns. A 16" brown emerged from the bank about my 4th cast on the first day, giving me a mistaken notion of how easy the fishing would be. The rest of the day disabused me of this notion, as it was the largest fish I would catch that day.
The morning of the second day I hooked into an enormous rainbow in a smallish pocket, just as we entered a riffle. Normally, when you hook a fish, even a pretty big one, they follow the boat with the current. But not this guy. He headed upstream as we went down. I was 20' into my backing when he broke off, just as the guide was able to stop the raft in a back eddy. I had a good look at the fish when he struck... it had deep maroon flanks, the color of dried blood, and was not only long, but tall and broad. I suspect it would have rivaled the largest trout I've ever caught, had I landed him. But it was not to be. Probably the biggest fish I landed was a 19" brown on the afternoon of the second day.
The fishing died in the middle of the day with direct sunlight. So we'd fish from 10 to 12 in the morning, and 4-7 in the afternoons. A smaller group might have started earlier, but we had to break camp in the morning, and I was the sole outsider with a family group of 5.
A somewhat nicer than average Gunnison Brown.
Loading the boats in the morning after camping. John, the other fisherman in the group, is standing, holding the 5 gallon water jug (John's family paddled along...there were some rather nice rapids). Bill, our guide, is standing in the water. Kevin is helping load the boat. Once underway, I was usually standing in the bow, braced against the aluminum tubing. All the crap in the boat was constantly snagging line, which was a frequent annoyance.
Bottom line is it's a wonderful fishery, and a recommended experience. If I were to do it again, I'd go with a friend and do it as a 2-day, one night trip. As it turned out, the last day was almost a complete bust anyway, as it was late and bright sun most of the time. The trick would be to rise early: if you could do 8-12 on the second day, take a siesta, and then finish 4-7 or so you could have a great experience with only one night of camping.
SOUTH FORK
South Fork seems like a throwback to the Colorado of the 1970s. There are only two restaurants in town (neither very good, though the "Hungry Logger" served a mean Hoevos Rancheros for breakfast, which forgives almost everything else). I met up there with Todd Bowen, who organizes my annual bonefishing pilgrimage to Punta Allen, and John Holtcamp, a friend of Todd's whom I've met briefly in Mexico. Todd went missing the first day, traveling to a junk yard to secure parts for his truck, and John and I drifted the Rio Grande with a guide.
The flows in the Rio Grande had just dropped the day before from about 1,600 cfs to under 1,000 cfs, which unsettles the fish. The morning (through early afternoon) was absolutely brutal. John and I each caught only two fish, having worked our butts off. We started with hopper/dropper fishing the banks (just like on the Gunnison). This is normally killer on the Rio, but neither of us had any luck. John picked up a fish rising to a yellow sally hatch, fishing from the bank, and I caught one on a deep nymph, holding behind a rock. We tried deep nymphing from the boat (nothing), streamers (picked up one nice fish in the first 5 minutes, then nothing more for over an hour). But for several hours there was nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
After lunch, I went back to hopper/dropper, and started fishing the very last foam line against the bank. A couple of fish seemed to flash on the fly, so I was encourage to keep going. Finally, about 2:30, a 15" brown sneaked out from a rock wall and took my dropper. Then, for the next 90 minutes of so, as long as I kept my cast aggressively, and dangerously, close to the bank, I had pretty good action, catching 6 or so fish, and raising a bunch more, almost all browns.
At the end of the day, the guide announced we were in "Lunker Lane", a place where big rainbows tended to hold, and he spotted one rising underneath the balcony of a house built right on the bank of the river. John was in the front of the boat, and put in a nice cast which it took....
A lovely fish, which redeemed the day for both of us.
The next day, John, Todd, and I fished the South Fork... catching small browns rising to tiny caddis emergers. It was good fun. Around noon, the hatch ended, and I hopped into the car for a 4 hour drive to Jemez Springs.
No comments:
Post a Comment