Tough day at Spinney

Had the day off so I was able to sneak out to Spinney Reservoir this morning! Hit the parking lot about 5:45am and started the hike to the islands. I was told the area was fishing well a week and a half ago. It should be prime Callibaetis and Damsel hatch time with some Chiro's and Giant Caddis around, too. The various forks of the South Platte were still extremely flooded as I passed them on the way in. I figured Spinney would be about capacity!

Well, that was not the case. The lake is something like 3 feet below capacity. I had never seen the islands so bare of water. These pics are usually all water...To make matters worse, the weeds have grown to the surface and that makes it very difficult to fish without snagging. I tried various nymph patterns both with and without the indicator without any luck. I finally put on a sz 10 Lime Stimulator with a Chiro underneath. I didn't see any Caddis yet but needed something bouyant to keep out of the weeds. Well first cast I was able to land this guy:

A 20" aerialist Bow with a huge chin. Fat fish and off the schnide!

Fishing was slow so I hopped in the float tube trying to get away from the weeds to deeper water like my man Brandon recommended. On the way I trolled various nymphs and enjoyed a Casa Magna Colorado :)

The weather started to get ugly with winds coming in at all directions which made float tubing very difficult. I could hear the guys in boats with anchors doing better than I was but I couldn't fish they way they were. I landed a couple more like this one who jumped so much he got the camera wet...

In between the gusts of wind I would see Callibeatis, Caddis, and Damsels come through the channels though there wasn't a prolifi hatch of any of them. There was a midge hatch that was insane right when I got there but the fish were not keyed in on them at all. Millions of grey and olive midges. I had never seen that at Spinney before.

I made a few friends with the Damsels. I named this one Fred.

About 11 the gale force winds picked up and never disappated. It was extremely difficult to paddle back to the islands in the face of the wind. I was exhausted. I wondered for a while if I could even do it but I made it after bypassing the open water for more cover of the islands and up one of the more protected channels.

It's tough to say fishing was poor when the smallest fish landed was 20" but they were few and far between. Lost a couple on LDR's and had my leader snap after what I beleive was a decent sized Pike - almost ripped the rod out of my hand and shredded the 7.5' 3X leader about half way through. I did see a number of Pike as the water was so shallow. I didn't try to fish for them at least on purpose because I wasn't properly equipped.

All in all a nice day, but tough fishing. After the hike back to the car in the face of the winds I was exhausted and very deserving of a cellared Jubilation Ale :)

The water level must have dropped because the guys that recommended the islands didn't say anything about how low the water was. If the resevoir was full it might have been an eipc day. Perhaps next time ;)

Spinney/Elevenmile Canyon

Had the day off today so Dave and I got up early to hit Spinney this morning. We rolled in about 5:45am to the lowest water level I've ever seen at the Reservoir. It was a little shocking. More shocking was we were just the 2nd car in. Our intention was to hike/float tube over to Buffalo Bay. However, as we drove over the dam, the water was boiling with risers...everywhere. We made the decision to at least try it out by the dam before moving over to the Bay. We geared up and on Dave's first cast he landed the hen above. She was spewing orange eggs everywhere and was super fat.
The morning was full of fish like this. Typical Spinney. :)
The morning quickly materialized into the best I've had on the reservoir. The fish were keyed in on Chironomids and were hammering them all over the place. 6 casts = 6 fish. 7th cast no fish? WTF? 6 more casts = 6 more fish! That's more like it. This was the pattern all morning, it was actually rather ridiculous. The sizes of the fish ranged from several younger age class 14" bows to several over 20". These new Hofer strains are aerial artists, too! Very entertaining watching pigs fly through the air and smack the surface like a dinner platter.
Not only is the paint chipping off the bead, the wire is toast, and the TMC 2488H (heavy hook) is bent to hell. The fish were hitting the flies so hard the flies lasted only a few fish before having to be replaced - time to tie some more Chiros!
We figured out that Dave wasn't fishing the depth as I was and as such wasn't into as many fish. We fished the same flies and weight but the difference of a foot made all the difference. As soon as we figured it out Dave was into more fish. We must have had like 4 doubles in the matter of 30 minutes.

Got Chironomids?

At 9am I hooked another fish and then then like a light switch the unusually calm morning we enjoyed for 3 hours immediately disappeared and transformed to Gale Force winds without warning. It didn't build up, it just changed in an instant. It was ridiculous and Dave and I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of the situation. The swells with the wind transformed the peaceful shore to the pacific shore. We decided to try and abandon the lake and hit the river. 3 hours, 30 fish. I am pretty sure Spinney is heaven.

The canyon isn't bad either :)

Dave dominated the river, I don't have any idea how many fish he hooked. This was one of the nicer fish, pretty Cutt!

Cutthroats like protein.

I was into some fish as well like this monster! Turned out to be the only brown all day, for me at least. The little dude was actually quite a fighter and had quite a belly.
Dave's Brown was a little bigger ;)At about 2 the wind was unbearable even in the protected canyon. We decided to head to the barn. All in all it was a fantastic day. Lots of fish with a great fishing buddy in an extremely serene, yet windy, setting. I wish I could do this more often.

Don't mind if I do.

Dry Flies at Spinney

Pretty sure this place is heaven.

So the wife let me sneak out for a morning at Spinney! I finally was able to take the 6 weight out of it's case and hit the water. I could only fish until noon so I knew I had to make the most of it and got up at 3:30 to be at the parking spot before 6am and on the water by 6:30am. The hike to the spot is generally level but it's a long way with a backpack stuffed with a float tube (which I never ended up using).By the time I got down to the water the hot air balloons were taking off East of Fairplay. Happens every time I fish Spinney on Saturday mornings, pretty cool.

Anyhow, I had heard the damsel and callibaetis hatches were in full swing so I rigged up a calli nymph with a stillwater nymph. I only used the rig for 5 minutes and missed a fish. While nymphing I saw this giant caddis come down and start skittering across the water. She lasted about 30 seconds before a nice rainbow annihilated the surface and took her down. That was all I needed to see. I quickly switched my setup and threw on a size 10 yellow Stimi.A few minutes later my efforts were rewarded! This was the first fish of the day and destroyed my fly. This isn't dry fly fishing on a stream with gentle sips of mayflies - these fish attack these giant caddis with reckless abandon often hurling their entire bodies out of the water as the attack the fly. There is no mistake about it, you know when the fish has hit your fly. One of the caddis hatched right next to me and made her way to my waders and I was able to take a couple pics before she flew off only to be inhaled by a trout. She was exactly the same size as my size 10 stimulators. I tried to get a picture of the underside as it's hard to tell the color from these pictures. While she appears a light olive here, the underside is more of a cream color. I didn't have anything to match exactly so I ended up using yellow stimulators until all I had were torn to shreds or broken off. I switched to olive, which was too dark, but still effective. I need to tie some to match this coloration. I had a quite a few fish reject the fly at the last second and I wonder if the color had much to do with this.
It's hard to take good pics when you're fishing by yourself. At least it is to me. I can't grip a 5lbs trout with my left hand well enough to snap a photo with my right. But here's another bow.This guy was a tough one. He not only destroyed my fly, see photo below, he jumped 10 times and took me into my backing twice. I have never had a fish take me into my backing on dries ever so that was pretty exciting. All the fish were about the same length in the 20-22" range and varied from 3 to 5 lbs. My arm/shoulder was tired when I left but I am not complaining!Hi I used to be a stimulator. This is the fly that took the fish above. I have no idea how I got him in as you can see the barb was broken off the shank of the hook. This was a perfect fly prior to that fish, oh well. I ended up not going back to nymphs all day. I saw a guy in a pontoon who came around nymphing and he was hooking up petty consistently. I might have had better success nymphing, but I did quite well on dries, ending up with about 10 before I started the hike back to the car about 11:30. I love fishing dries and as I am unable to get out nearly as often as I'd like due to the babies at home I simply stuck with it. As enjoyable as cast....strip-strip....pause....strip-strip-strip is it was much more of a challenge to mimic the skittering caddis on top of the water without drowning the fly. It was a game of finesse. By the end of the day I could cast to the opposite bank/island and perform the maneuver fairly well. Fish will strike a fly that isn't moving, but I had more success in skittering and pausing. A few times the fish hit the fly within a second of landing. It was difficult to cast 1 dry with the notorious South Park winds that picked up mid morning but the islands protect the channel fairly well and fish were feeding all over so it didn't matter much really. I tried to combo a yellow and an olive but that didn't work as I couldn't control the flies as well and it didn't seem natural. These caddis don't fly in groups so I switched back to the single. The key seemed to be making as much "noise" on the surface as possible. The real caddis leave a wake and flutter their wings in a very distinct pattern so my twitching and popping the fly it seemed the best I could do to replicate.Can't think of a better way to finish up a great day on the water and a long hike back to the car from mosquito central. I didn't see any callibaetis of damsel nymphs in the water all day. Early on there was a little chiro hatch but that was about it. When the Calli hatch is on the fishing is unparalleled, but its tough to have more fun that the caddis hatch. I wasn't expecting to see any as I hadn't heard reports about them all year and there weren't really that many of them around but the trout were keyed it on them. I didn't see 1 skitter on the surface more than 30 seconds or so before a trout took it down. I remember a couple days last year where the caddis were everywhere and the fishing was amazing. This trip wasn't quite up to that standard but was a hell of a lot of fun. Hope to make it out again soon.

South Park

Hit the Dream Stream, finally, with Dave. Got there about 7:45am and was 3rd car in the lot. The other two guys were practically standing on top of each other at the hole beneath the bridge. We walked all the way down to Elevenmile and worked our way back in search of Kokanee. On the way down we spooked a bunch which were sitting in skinny water and riffles. Also on the way down my rubber net apparently eroded it's screw away and has been lost somewhere on Spinney Mountain Ranch - not cool. Anyhow, as we worked our way back we saw a lot of the resident trout and a couple large Bows but the only Brown we saw was a very diseased fish sitting inverted in the water column, clearly on its last legs.
The Kokanee had moved from the riffles to deeper pools by the time we were making it back. They seemed to frequent the sporadic assortment of white rocks on the stream bed. As the majority of the Dream Stream is weeds, silt, and darker rocks it made sighting the fish pretty simple, really. Dave sight-casted to one who took his Orange Stimulator on the first cast. It turned out to be the only Koke we landed all day. I thought it was odd that drowning a Stimi with a splitshot a few inches in front of it would trigger a strike, evidently it did. The Koke was dropping eggs like crazy. It was interesting that they looked almost identical in color, shape, and clarity to the eggs dropped by the Rainbows at Delaney a couple weeks back.
We continued up stream and ran into a huge elk likely dieing in the field just south of the river. Pretty impressive animal, but it looked like he too was diseased or had been shot and wandered to this spot. He repeatedly stood up and laid down, but that was about it. One of the gentlemen who pointed the elk out to us mentioned that we would contact the DOW about the wounded elk.

After speaking a couple friendly local guys we ran into it sounds like the Browns have returned to Elevenmile and the Kokanee run just isn't what is was a couple years back, though better than last year. When I fished for them in 2007 flows were around 150cfs, which may or may not effect the salmon run? Sounds like we missed prime time by a couple weeks tops, flows were 73 cfs which are a little low. I have heard rumors that the gill lice really affected the Elevenmile Kokes so it was good to see at least a few in the river.

We didn't really fish for the trout in the river due to the ridiculous amount of people on the water so we decided to try the our luck at Spinney. Our lot had grown to at least 15 vehicles and there were now a good dozen people fishing the hole under the bridge! We saw a guy fighting a fish and stuck around because the way he was acting as though it was sure to be a trophy. Turned out to be a 6" whopper and we promptly left. Headed over to Spinney by the dam.

I have fished Spinney more times than I can count but never this late in the year so we were pretty blind. Tried by the Dam and South Ramp with little luck so we decided to move over to the main ramp as we had seen some risers on the way in. Started out slow there, too, but all of a sudden we started landing fish after fish all of which were 12" carbon copies of each other. It took us a few minutes to realize this sudden pick-up in action was perhaps directly due to the fact a large DOW truck from the hatchery was unloading into the lake, lol. After a pretty slow day it was pretty entertaining to catch eager fish cast after cast after cast, even if they were stockers. I had been told that the often caught Spinney Bows that have stubs as fins and are clearly beaten up were due to run ins with the Pike. This is clearly not the case because these stockers bear the same damage. Dave and I figured this was probably due to living in the concrete channels (or whatever they are called) at the hatchery. I found this interesting. I contacted the Park to get more information on the truck and this is the response I received:

"That truck was the last of several trucks that just stocked 45,000 - twelve inch - Hofer X Harrison Rainbow Trout. These are 3 year old fish from the Rifle Fish Hatchery. We have found that this cross (Hofer X Harrison) grow longer that previous strains stocked. "

I am quite excited to see how big these Hofer/Harrison bows can get! The current fish are fatties but only grow to average about 20" though I have caught fish up to 22.5" and heard of bows landed in the 24" range. If the little guys are any indication of the new strain's potential, they have a voracious appetite and will grow quickly under the ice this winter. Hopefully the Pike's metabolism has slowed and this new arsenal of Bows can dominate Spinney in the coming years.

Side note: Tons of hunters around today, far more than I have ever heard out there.

Did You Know...

I was reading up on the Colorado Division of Wildlife website about Spinney Reservoir and I came across the above graphic which had been included on an old Fishery Management Plan for Spinney. I thought it was an interesting tidbit of information, kinda cool!

The Fishey Management Plan, though outdated, was also pretty interesting:
http://wildlife.state.co.us/NR/rdonlyres/8ACE44A5-2B96-4F7E-A610-98742AF67981/0/SpinneyMtnResMngmtPlan.pdf