Camping-Memorial Weekend

I have been trying to get up to Flaming Gorge for over a month now to fish for the spawning rainbows. One of my patients goes up 3-4 times a week and always lets me know how good it was. Finally this last week, he told me that I better get up there with in a day or two because the fishing has started to slow down. I took the boys up wednesday after work and got a flat tire on the dirt road down to the lake. I decided that I would fish a bit anyways before driving home 50 miles on my donut spare tire. I had my patients secret fly which is basically a ginger bugger with no hackle. My very first cast I landed the fish below. It was frustrating after that because you could see over 5lb rainbows everywhere within the first 10-20 feet of shore but none of the fish were interested. Next year remind me to go in April!
This last weekend I decided to go to currant creek for a camping trip. My dad and brother met us up there for a quick friday/saturday trip. Saturday morning we went to the lake to let the kids chuck some bait. When we got to our favorite spot, there were about 15 "out of towners" with their buckets filled with trout. Jace ended up catching a few smaller cutts, and I caught some smaller browns below the dam in the river. On the way home we made a little detour to our secret tiger lake and ended up catching about 20 cutthroats that where piled up in the little inlet.

This lake is a brood lake for the native bonneville cutthroats. They had some bright red coloration to their bellies since they are spawning.

Jace with his cutthroat from currant creek.

Tigers

Today one of my old patients and I headed out to catch some big tiger trout. We fished all morning with no success, and then with the help of another fisherman we ran into, we figured out how to fish this lake. This lake is FULL of scuds and these tigers hang out on the bank and slurp theses scuds all day long. Fishing here was really fun because it is all sight fishing to big fish. The fly of the day was a tan scud with a orange bead in the body. Light olive scuds worked too but not like the other one.

The guy we ran into fishes this lake about every week and really had the fishing down to a science. He was the only person on this lake catching fish until he let me in on his secret and gave me a few flies! After that I caught about 6 nice tiger trout.

Bro's No Ho's Trip

This last Saturday Trent and Todd came up to visit for our yearly bro's no ho's fishing trip. This sacred fishing trip has become a long tradition for the brother-in-laws on the Carter side of the family, where we bro's go fishing and of course leave the... our beautiful wives home. This year Trent out fished everyone with his 6 hooked rapala that is now dubbed "old faithful".

Todd had a first class guided tour in the front of the drift boat and ended up catching half a dozen fish. Some of the flies that were productive on our trip where: the mole fly, different dry midge patterns, red wd-40, and a rainbow zonker. The majority of our fish where caught up top on dry flies. We never did see a real good may fly hatch but fish were sipping midges sporadically throughout the day.

I was the drift boat captain the whole trip and ran the rapids like a pro. Trent offered to row a few times to let me fish, but flash backs of being high centered on a rock the last trip Trent rowed kept popping into my head. Saturday was fairly windy which made it difficult to row and even harder to cast a fly line, but we all made it down alive and all caught some nice trout.