January, 2001

1/2:  The Eagle's still too iced over to fish, but warmer temperatures in the next few days might bring an opportunity.  Too many days in a row of ski instructing have put the damper on any casting for now.  If I had a chance to spend a few hours in the immediate vicinity of Vail, I'd choose any sewer plant outfall area on either Gore Creek or the Eagle.

The other decent options would be the Blue in Silverthorne, Muddy Creek's tailwater, or the Roaring Fork below Basalt.  With luck I'll try the latter next Monday or Tuesday.

1/5:  Miracle of miracles!  The first fish of the new year today.  We arrived in Glenwood late in the afternoon & the sun was long off the water, so it was cold as sin.  But the dog & I trudged down to the Fork through some snowfields & I rigged up a double nymph setup of leading #16 red midge followed by a #20 midge emerger.

Stumbled off the shore ice into the stream & waded out beyond a big ice shelf and began casting.  Sure enough, a handful of drifts later, hooked & landed a fat bodied 16 inch rainbow.  After several more strikes I hooked & played a very large brown of 20-22 inches that eventually broke off.   Later lost a couple more fish and landed one other 13 inch bow.  It was fun.   I had low expectations given recent lack of success, but it turned out to be a fine 45 minutes of fishing.

Last Logbook Entry  � for previous days.

1/24:  A beautiful sunny day for a change.   Visions of trout slurping my nymph.  So much for that fantasy.  Drove back from Eagle along the river & found only one spot where the ice had not completely covered the stream.  Somewhat scary treading lightly on the ice shelf out to the open water.  Plenty of decent casting in this run, but no sign of midges or anything else in the air.  Also no strikes of any sort on the tiny bead head copper john or the midge emerger trailing it.

The probability is that the fish were all resting under the ice shelf & just were not yet willing to venture out in even the slow paced run that normally holds plenty of bodies in the summer.  It was great exercising the casting arm again but would have been nice to at least get a strike or two.

This concludes the least amount of fishing I've ever done in a January.  We're off to Europe for a week or so & will hope for better (warmer) conditions in February to open up some of the ice cover.

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