August, 2020

8/3-4:  This was my solo one time trip to what's been one of our favorites streams - the White River.  To find out why it might (or might not) be my last trip there, take a look at the short video of the outing:

8/5-6:  This was one of those goofy outings focused around the dogs instead of us.  But we love and enjoy our doggie's lives as much as we do our own.  Here's a quickie video of the trip up towards the headwaters of the Crystal River.

8/10-12:  It was our first return to Flaming Gorge after an absence of a single year.  We enjoy kayaking with the dogs and doing some streamer fly trolling with them, but recognize that being even moderately successful is highly unlikely the way we're rigged too close to the surface on this lake.

Found a halfway nice camping spot that gave us a modicum of privacy on a point well into the main part of the lake.  It was a decent night's sleep.  Next day we inflated the kayak and after a few paddle strokes, raced back to shore due to an oncoming thunderstorm wave of wind.  Later in the morning we did a longish paddle along the shore to the East and Sue hooked and released a couple of nice smallmouths.  In fact one was the largest smallie I've ever seen in my life.  It may have been 10-12 pounds easily, but we'll really never know.   We always try to release our hookups gently, and we did so with this one too without hoisting it from the water to admire it.

After a lunch back at camp another storm blew through our space rolling over the kayak and exposing the black vinyl bottom to the sun.  My mistake to not think about what that might cause as a problem because eventually we heard a report like a rifle shot and found that one of the welded seams had failed due to air expanding beyond its air pressure holding capability.  So much for any more trolling.  We were done with the boat.

I spent the afternoon on the rocks at the point and at some "point" hooked what looked like a really good sized smallmouth.  After playing it for a while, a second good sized bass appeared behind the leader - it had taken the trailing fly.  Needless to say, that made my day - and trip for that matter.

But the outing was fun in the end.  We drove the back road down to the bottom of the B section of the Green River tailwater and tried some casting along the back down there.  Unfortunately Flaming Gorge has elevated its releases and the water was running way too high for us to have any success.  So we headed home.  Not unhappy.

Last Logbook Entry  � for previous day

8/25:  We're running out of fishing options here in Colorado.  There's no water.  As in there's not enough of that stuff running in our local streams.  The fish are stressed and we're not supposed to be casting to them any more this summer.  (Tell that to all the guiding operations and hear what they say back.)

Anyway I found a small tough-to-get-to section of the upper Eagle River yesterday where the water was shallow but cooler and hopefully I didn't overstress any of the fish I released.  Here's a tiny video of what was an interesting couple of hours on the water.

Next Monday we're taking off for the Green River area of Wyoming for a few days and hope it will be OK up there.

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