A later than normal fishing/camping trip to this large body of water in Southern Utah.

3694 Feet Pool Depth This Date

Circumstances in April and May prevented getting away to one of our favorite warm water spots, so mid-June was the first opportunity we had to do our early trip down here.

On the way to Lake Powell we had to stop by Montrose in Colorado to allow friend Sue work time at a local power company office. As she needed several hours to do some interviewing, it offered me a chance to explore the local fishing scene. Unfortunately the Uncompaghre River was still in a runoff mood, and quite frankly, public access to that river seems very limited.

But happily, as I was returning to Montrose from some unsuccessful attempts at river access, I spotted a small artificial lake on the southern border of town known as Chipeta Lake. It's pretty typical of this type of water with a walkable dike completely around it and several established fishing piers built out into the water itself.

Sunfish abounded and using a double nymph rig, double landings were common. The larger bass were completely disinterested in any kind of fly, but after I began casting a small black woolly bugger further out in the lake, I started catching very nice cutthroats. Probably landed a dozen in an hour or so ranging in size from 11-14 inches. So all in all this was a nice start to the trip.

At Lake Powell we loaded up a rubber dinghy with camping gear and towed it behind our wash deck kayak to a really neat camping spot a couple of miles from the Bullfrog ferry terminal. The isolation from the stack-a-shack campgrounds was wonderful.

And for the next few days we did plenty of shoreline casting coupled with a couple of trolling sessions each day - and plenty of fly tying when the heat of the day became overwhelming. Though the open water fishing was nonexistent due to higher water temperatures, trolling a couple of buggers along deep rock walls proved very productive.

This year we found that the black buggers outshone the grey pearl flies that are normally superior, and that's probably due to the fact that threadfin shad simply were not present in these warmer conditions.

Our catch consisted of 95% smallmouths ranging in size from 7-13 inches. Both of us caught a nice channel cat, both had on good sized largemouth bass, and Sue landed a walleye that was in the 18-20 inch range and was the prize of the trip. These fish were all taken on woolly buggers of either black or gray tone, and we found that the fishing was better deeper, so the full sinking line was superior to just a ten foot sink tip. All in all, and as usual, it was a very successful trip.