February, 2008

 

2/9:  February's behaving like it's a clone of January.  Nothing but bitterly cold temperatures and relentless snows.  With no changes in the coming forecasts, it looks like our first chances to get out on the water this year won't come until March.

Last Logbook Entry  � for previous day     

2/16:  Hooray!  Double hooray!  Finally a brief chance to get out on the water today.  With a long set of ski instruction bookings coming up for me starting tomorrow and Sue actually having a day off from skiing too, we opted to tie in a trip to Costco with the possibility of actually doing a bit of fishing on the Eagle in the afternoon.

We did our shopping had a bit of lunch and drove back through Gypsum with the idea of possibly getting to cast on the lower part of the Eagle just above the Gypsum Ponds.  That turned out to be an unproductive thought since when we parked the car off the freeway and made a short stumble through the snow down to the stream, the river was way too iced over to even begin to get a nymph down to whatever fish might be holding under the shore ice.

So we continued on to the exit to the town of Eagle and drove a bit further downstream below the fairgrounds area.  Since the river was also running quite murky here as well, Sue decided just to walk along while I made what we assumed would be some fruitless casts into dark waters.

 

We made our way further down the river and started casting just across from the confluence with Brush Creek.  

 

This stream was at least sending some clearer water into the river, and after a few minutes I was excited to hook and release the first fish of 2008, a nice little twelve inch brown.

 

Gosh it was fun though to finally get out on the water and actually feel life at the end of the tippet.  

 

We're going have a long and heavy runoff this spring, but hopefully there will be a "sweet spot" in the flow sometime in March that we can enjoy before all the creeks and rivers blow out completely.

 

 

 

 

 

2/27:  Happily the month's almost over.  From a fishing standpoint, good riddance.  From a skiing standpoint, it was great.  So we can't have everything.

A quick trip to the Eagle County offices today brought the opportunity to get out on the water again, but the past couple of day's snow melting had already turned the river an ugly brown.  

 

Still not quite murky enough to rule out nymphing, I tried that in a favorite pool but had zero success.

 

Made a half mile walk downstream to another "hot" spot and encountered Mr. Skunk again.  Changing to a black wooly bugger and alternating dead drifting with twitched retrieves was equally unsuccessful.  Oh well.  It was just nice to be outside in the sun.

With roughly two straight weeks of ski teaching ahead of me, there's little opportunity to get back on the water until very late in March.  If temperatures warm too quickly, that short window of generally nice fishing this coming month will probably disappear.

 

 
 

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