Doc and Jeff

Last week I got the chance to fish with my good buddy Greg also known as the "Doc" and his friend Jeff. We decided to go up the white for a change of pace. The water was low. The boys stayed committed to throwing foam and we certainly were able to force feed several nice fish but the majority of our fish were just good ole sassy healthy rainbows! Still fun watching some explosive strikes. Here are a couple of the better fish we got the chance to play with.

My Man Henry

Sunday and Monday I took my man Henry out for a little fishing. Sunday we worked really hard for a few fish..thunderstorms eventually blew us off the river around mid day. Monday however was a different game. Fished the same stretch of water and it was like a completely new river. Henry started the morning off with a nice brown and he ended the day with a nice brown. Plus lots of rainbows throughout the course of the day!

A Journey West Part IV

So The San Juan is most famous for its Midge fishing. It has some great bug hatches throughout the year but for the most part, especially in august the sub surface bite was all about midges. Lots of our action came either on size 22 annelids, or size 24 midge pupa. The cool thing was that we could ease an anchor out of top of these enormous fish and watch them feed and sight cast at them. Here are a couple of my favorite fish Hays and I landed one Midges!

Hooked

Last Sunday I got the chance to fish with a father and son. Jason and Gage have been avid fisherman for a long time but had only tried fly fishing one other time. They did great. They both caught on quick and were catching fish left and right. Gage who is 12 of course had a competitive streak in him wanted to keep score...I think after it was 27 to 24 ( Gage's favor) he quit counting! Jason did land this awesome fish one the second to last run of the day which just made the day even that much better!

A Journey West Part III

One of the really cool high lights of the trip was the opportunity we had to fish Florida creek. My friend Mark works for a ranch in Durango that has over 3 miles of completely private water on the Florida. (Flow-ree-da) is how the locals pronounce it. Anyways the creek was awesome, it was full of browns, bows and cut bows. There was still some nocturnal stone fly activity so the fish  were keyed in on them. Caddis, and other small may flies cruised the air too that day. We probably landed 70-80 between the three of us. Each angler landed a 20 inch rainbow which was pretty sweet. Unfortunately Mark has the pic of his on his camera. It was a nice change of pace from fishing midges on the Juan!

Journey West Part II

So As you all read from the last post I wanted to break the trip up a little bit for you guys. It would be way to much information for just one post. We spend most of our time on the San Juan drifting or sliding anchors out on top of fish who were actively feeding. The first day full day of floating we really wanted to either chuck streamers or toss dry flies...The Juan is different in the fact that those fish really have a hard time eating any thing other than size 24 midges, not because they don't want to but because they don't know how! Anyways with some persistence we forced some fish to eat our big streamers and nasty dries...Here are just a couple of shot's of a few of the San Juan's browns. As many of the locals told us, "they aren't nearly as nice as yall's browns but they sure do pull hard"

A Journey West

For the past 11 days or so my friend Hays and I have traveled a lot of miles...We drove down Hwy 40 W for 1,000 miles with a drift boat in tow. We floated the San Juan, We waded the Animas and the Florida. We camped, we stayed in crappy motels, We bunked with friends. We laughed hard, We got frustrated with selective midge eating fish, We crossed the eyes of some great fish and had our eyes crossed by some great fish. I am going to post a few pics at a time and catch you all up to speed with just a few photos of the awesomeness that was our Journey into the west in search of Enlightenment, Refreshment and big tugs!