November, 2005

 11/6:  With the Broncos on a bye week this Sunday and decent weather for a change, I drove out to the golf course area of Gore Creek to get in what will probably be some of the last casts of the year.  Two of the regularly fished ponds are already iced over and done until next April, but one was still open, so I threw an olive wooly bugger all the way around its limited shoreline.

The strikes were very tough to feel as the water's quite cold now and the fish more or less somnolent.  Had a number of touches and saw several trout turn to the streamer but only played three mixed browns & brookies.  Gore Creek was much better.  It's running quite low & clear and the fish didn't seem to want to move very far for any feeding, but the same streamer placed in deeper runs and eddies almost always brought a strike or two.  I was surprised at how aggressive the stream fish were compared to those in the ponds.

Sizes weren't anything to talk about with a fourteen inch rainbow being the best of the afternoon.  Playing a dozen trout made up for no Bronco's game however.

We'd planned a last trip to the Green starting tomorrow but with more snow in the forecast, it looks like any other outings this fall will be pretty much limited to local day trips.

11/9:  Our county recorder office has turned to a new software system for reporting real estate transactions and unfortunately they've not figured out how to upload the data to the web yet, so it means biweekly trips to that office to manually input data I need.  That's the bad news.  The better news is that these trips will probably allow some more fishing on the Eagle until we're truly shut down by big winter storms.  And that was the case today.

Drove all the way to Gypsum & did a turnaround at the off ramp, heading back up I-70 towards the Gypsum ponds turnoff.  Being somewhat disinclined to waste the time putting on waders, I simply rigged up an olive wooly bugger and walked the bank for a half mile or so upstream and began casting the streamer into (hopefully) likely holding areas.  The first quarter mile was a big zero & visions of meeting Mr. skunk came to mind.

But a deeper eddy near the shore eventually brought a sixteen inch rainbow to the fly and a cast or two later, a very nice eighteen inch brown from the same hole.  Further downstream another sixteen inch brown came reluctantly to hand.  That was pretty much it for the first stop.

We drove to the upper parking area for this part of the river and again did a long hike upstream.  Unfortunately my unwillingness to put on the waders pretty much did me in up here.

It's impossible to walk this bank to get to some of the better areas so most of my casts went for naught in some shallower runs and holes.  The only exception was a little ten inch rainbow that hit the streamer hard when it slipped into the seam of a large boulder in the middle of the river.

As the day was relatively warm and overcast, there was a nice batch of midges emerging along the bank, but no heads came up for them.  It's probably time to get back to that type of fishing I most dread - long deep nymphing with tiny midge larva.

Last Logbook Entry  � for previous days.

11/18:  The sky is falling.  The sky is falling.  The end is near - of fishing that is.  Went to Eagle this morning to input some data and afterwards, did a repeat of last week's trip to the Gypsum Ponds section of the river.  It was a different story today.  With single digit temperatures overnight all through the past week the water has cooled to mid winter readings, and the fish seem to have ceased any movement whatsoever. 

Tried a double streamer rig for an hour in some wonderful, deep runs with absolutely zero success. 

Finally shifted to a double nymph rig of leading heavy black stone and trailing prince and picked up one lonesome twelve inch brown in a slow moving eddy.  That was it. 

Unless we get some kind of early December warm up - or we're somehow able to get up to the White or Green for a couple of days, our fishing's pretty much done for the year.

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