Not a great late spring in Vail, but no lack of sunshine down here in Southern Utah.

This spring's trip to Lake Powell was hotter than sin - but happily, so was the fishing.

As always, we headed for the Stanton Creek primitive camping area but had a pleasant/rude awakening on arrival. A series of spanking new porta-sans had been placed on the peninsula where previously none had existed. So the good news is that you no longer have to bike or hike a mile to the permanent johns, but the bad news is that it looks like next season there will be pay-to-stay camping down here. A big disappointment to those of us who like less civilization.

In fact every day we were visited by smiley-faced park rangers offering free garbage bags, free advice, and of course, unwanted intrusions on our privacy.

On to better things. We (friend Sue & I) set up the tent, arranged the campsite, and then headed out on out for a quick afternoon of fly casting and trolling on my washdeck kayak - a Malibu Two. Just Sue & I & Woody the basset hound. Amazingly the fishing proved to be immediately productive. Strikes came rapidly & often and we must have landed a dozen smallmouths or so.

Over the five day period we were at the lake we saw no other fly fishers. In fact, except for some other Denver friends who were with us last fall, we've never seen anyone else with fly rods down here. Big mistake fly casters! It's really good fun down here.

But I'll have to admit it's taken a few years to develop the techniques that make flies a viable approach to taking these warm water species. We always carry complete tying kits for the trip as that's a great way to while away a few off-the-water hours and besides snags and sharp toothed critters take their toll on a fly box that needs to be replenished almost daily.

Though I'll admit we've scarcely scratched the surface of what will probably work, let's pass along the tactics that proved highly successful this year. Choice of patterns is quite important. For both trolling and shoreline casting we've found that a two fly rig is by far the best. Apparently fish of all species seem intrigued by one fly chasing another and they respond with great aggression to both flies.

Our most successful rig is shown here. An 18 inch 6# tippet is tied to the leader.

The leading or upper fly was originated this year and we'll just call it a grey pearl. It's tied on a regular shank #10 or #12 nymph hook. The head is a pearl colored bead. Body is made from a single strand of crystal twist doubled and wound from the tail forward. The remaining crystal twist ends are trimmed to match the length of a fairly short bunch of marabou tied in right behind the head. The fly has exceptional movement in the water and it's my feeling that it must closely imitate the threadfin shad that run in huge schools in this lake.

The trailing fly is somewhat larger and is tied on a 2-4X long shanked hook - either in size 8 or 10. Sue used a standard black woolly bugger this year with great success and I tied up a new style shown here using a brown lite-brite dubbed body, black rabbit strip wing, and black sheep's wool head trimmed to shape.

There didn't seem to be much difference between the bugger and the rabbit flies in terms of takes, but the coloration was critical. Although we tried various olive, brown, and other combinations, the black & gray flies were far superior. This was also the case last year although the patterns themselves were somewhat different.

Best trolling speed was basically quite slow. We were paddling quietly and attempted to keep the flies off the bottom, but that's about all. I brought along a 15 foot sink tip and Sue primarily used a full sinking line (both of us use 5 weights, although 6-7 would probably be better). The full sinking line may be the better choice depending on how deep the fish are lying. For casting from the shore the sink tip line is preferable.

Generally we found that trolling as close as possible to steep rock walls without getting hung up too much was the best approach. In fact the person who happened to have their rod closest to the shore generally got twice as many strikes.

Again the hookup to strike ratio was not great. I'd suspect that we had 3-4 strikes for every fish brought to hand & released. Casting from the shore was a different matter. Hand twist retrieves moved the flies over the bottom and a tip twitch for every twist produced the best results.

OK, so what did we catch. 99% were smallmouths, but not really large ones. Sizes ranged from 4" through 14" and the average was probably 10". One nice walleye was landed along with a largemouth, a striper (of all things this early in the season), and one lonely sunfish. Action proved steady throughout each of the days we went out. I'd suspect we had at least 4-5 strikes an hour. Sue had one double landing of smallmouths and I was fortunate to have four doubles myself.

Due to the higher winds this year we had no opportunity to ease small nymphs (scuds, etc.) over the bottom and we had hoped to try some surface poppers, but that too never came about.

But all in all it was a very rewarding trip. With luck we'll get down again in the fall when the stripers should be more active on the surface slashing at the schools of threadfins.