Arkansas Sportsman

Arkansas tactics no good in Colorado trout stream

Standing waist-deep in one of the great trout streams of the Southwest, I was frustrated beyond words.

I fished the trophy section of the Conejos River in southeast Colorado near the New Mexico border. For days, Bill Eldridge and I had stewed in anticipation of catching wild brown trout in such a storied setting. Once there, I couldn't make any sense of it.

The stream was about 30 yards at the widest. Long stretches were shallow enough for me to slowly zig-zag upstream. I skirted deep holes by walking along the bank. That was tricky because the bank is steep and rocky. I clambered across the tops of massive boulders, and I was careful about where I put my feet and hands lest they offend a western diamondback rattlesnake.

The Conejos is a fly fisherman's dream. It has long runs and deep seams that cut straight and winding paths between countless boulders. Behind the boulders are deep pockets and eddies. Deeper holes are along the banks where the current thrashes against bedrock. After the current swings away from the bank, it breaks into two and sometimes three different channels. Each thread is full of targets, almost like a three-gun shooting course.

The grand finale, as far as I was concerned, was a deep pool at the bottom of a narrow fall. It was at least 15 feet deep, maybe more. The hydraulics of that pool pull the water straight down and then shoot it straight back up at the end. The tops of other big rocks form spires along the margins.

The water is as clear as the voice of reason. I saw fish tailing in the runs and behind the rocks. Big trout frequently broke cover to nab an insect on the surface. They didn't sip the bugs the way Arkansas trout do. They slammed the surface, more like smallmouth bass. They often did it at rod's length, but I couldn't buy a strike.

The current was too fast. I used nymphs the way I use them on the White, Norfork and Little Red rivers, but my tactics were useless there. Arkansas streams are swift, but they are much more open and fish are well distributed. If your fly is wet, it's in a strike zone.

Not so in the Conejos. Strike zones are compact, and the current is so swift that it's hard to keep a drift in a strike zone long enough for a trout to react to it.

I tried everything. I cast way above targets, but the current blew the fly through it before the fly could get down deep to where the fish were. I put a split shot on my line above the fly, but it wasn't enough. Worse, the weight often snagged on the bottom in shallow stretches before it reached the target. My strike indicator complicated things by speeding the drift and lifting the fly off the bottom. I tried fishing without a strike indicator, but it made it harder to keep contact with my fly.

I tried bigger nymphs, but that didn't work either. I hooked one fish, but it slipped the barbless hook before I could bring it to the net. After about five hours, I cried "Uncle." I left the trophy area and caught a nice brown with a spinning rod and a jerkbait.

Back home, I asked a friend at the Ozark Angler how one should fish such water. His answer surprised me.

"Dry flies," he said. "Cast them to slower water around the edges. Those trout are looking up all the time, and that's the kind of thing they're looking for. They'll see it, and they'll come get it."

Unless, he added, there are a lot of bubbles on the surface. It's hard for trout to see insects on the surface through bubbles.

You've still have the same problem of the current grabbing your line and blowing it downstream, I said.

"You just have to hold your rod real high and strip line like crazy," he said.

I also could have tried a big streamer. That's how a fellow named Mike West caught a 32-inch, 14-pound rainbow trout on Colorado's Taylor River while we were there. Actually, he got an assist from a 14-inch brown trout that took a smaller fly. The rainbow ate the brown trout. West cut the line and tied on a big streamer, and the rainbow nabbed it.

That kind of thing used to happen frequently on the White and the Norfork. I haven't heard a story like that in years.

Dry flies, huh? I'll remember that.

Sports on 07/27/2014

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