This year for our annual fall fishing trip we headed back up towards Island Park, ID. Jarron, Ben and I met up in Rigby where we stayed with Jarrons in-laws Sunday night. That night Jarrons father-in-law cooked up an awesome venison dinner for us. Monday morning we took off early to fish Sheridan Lake. Every year since we fished Guild we have tried a new private lake, and Sheridan was suppose to be that awesome private lake. We got to Sheridan around 8 and were fishing by 8:30 and started hooking in to a bunch of fish that ranged from 12 to 16 inches. After fishing all morning and nothing to big we decided to fish the river on their property that was suppose to be good also.
We got to the creek that was not very big and we were already a little skeptical since the lake had flopped. One of the guys from Sheridan told us their were big fish in this creek well over 20 inches. We got to the first hole and looked in the water and could not believe what we were seeing. The hole was stacked with fish and a few nice ones too. Later we headed towards another hole, which the guy told us their were 200 fish in this one hole. Well, the pic below is the 200 fish hole, and from where Jarron is at to the top of the picture was stacked with fish, probably close to 200, I don't know.
In the picture below you can see all of the fish stacked up, which is how it looked throughout this hole. Although we did not catch any real pigs in the creek, it definitely made up for the lake.
After fishing the creek most of the afternoon we headed back to the lake to see if it would redeem itself. Crusing around in the boat I could see a couple of nice fish and we even caught a few bigger fish, but not private lake sized fish.
That night we packed up and drove to Henrys Lake where we set up camp and planned on fishing the next couple of days. Tuesday morning the weather was crappy, rainny, and worst of all windy! We put out on the lake anyways, hoping to catch a huge hybrid rainbow and some nice cutts. We did catch a few smaller cutts, but the fishing was tough and the water was murky with the visibility being about 1 foot. After fighting the wind most of the day we decided to give up and grabbed a late lunch. During lunch we looked at the weather report for the next day and decided to pack up and leave Henrys. Ben had to be to work the next day so he headed straight home and Jarron and I went back to his in-laws for a nice bed to sleep in. The next morning we got up and headed towards a lake I had been wanting to fish for awhile.
After only one wrong turn we finally made it to our destination. Fish were jumping all over the place so we started to throw our normal assortment of big buggers with no avail. After seeing some midges come off the water we both switched up to smaller stuff, and one of us even used a bobber, or sorry and "indicator". Finally we started to catch fish, but they were all around 12 inches. I had begun to think that we were cursed on this trip and would not catch anything real nice. In a last ditch effort we cruised towards the north end of the lake, and with one of my first casts up towards some reeds sticking out of the water, finally saw the water explode and felt a good tug on the end of my rod. The rest of the morning and afternoon we hooked into nicer fish with the occasional bout of smaller fish mixed in.
We stuck to smaller stuff all day mainly throwing callibaetis nymphs, prince nymphs, stillwater nymphs and even a halfback nymph. We pumped some bellies and found some olive and orange scuds mixed in with midges.
On several occasion we both hooked into fish at the same time.
At one time we both caught fish that were nearly the exact same length
In the afternoon there was a good hour where the fish turned it up a notch. I hooked into a fish that nearly took me into my "backing" ha ha. We had thought that I foul hooked him, but when I finally got him near the boat the fly was right in his mouth. Then Jarron hooked into a fish that again we thought had to be fouled, but again was in the mouth. We spent the next hour catching nice big fish that fought real hard. Even the smaller big fish fought harder than they did before. After the hour was up we caught nothing but small fish for just about the rest of the time, with an occasional lunker mixed in.
