drake up date

been on the water a lot these past few weeks. having big fishing families at the ranch is great - it usually means lots of trips with the same folks over the course of the week, which is a great way to bond on the water, catch a bunch of fish, have a lot of fun and ultimately get some good grease at the end of the week.
the drakes have come and gone. we had a good two weeks of them up and down the creek, on various stations, depending on the day. the photo above has about two hundred of them in it, but i'm not sure how well you can see them. for many days, the pattern was to get to a hole with an extended body drake, whack two or three or four with that, then put on a parachute adams, whack another two or three, then depending on how many fish we saw in the run, try one of the other four drake patterns i have and try to sting a few more.

one interesting thing was that, just about every day, right around 11:30 the hatches would stop and the fish would stop feeding on the surface. one theory i had was that by 11:30 the water had warmed up just enough to stop the drakes from hatching, which in turn stopped the fish from rising. another theory was that the fish had gorged themselves so much while the drakes were around that they had no need to rise anymore. either way, when the fishing screeched to a hault at just about 11:30 every day, and we had another hour and a half of fishing to do, tactics had to be changed. so my rig changed from dry to wet and we went sub-surface. drake nymph, PMD nymph was the ticket and it worked. 3 to 1 on the PMD, but those fish were definitely still eating. it was a pretty cool thing to watch the stream go from an explosion of drake rises to not a single rise in the course of fifteen minutes. as the fish change their feeding, so i would change my presentation and i was fortunate to have good fishing both during and after the drake hatches. probably a half dozen times in the past few weeks, i have changed flies or rigs and on the very next cast hooked a fish.

the three pictures below are of Kathleen, Jessica and Jessica and Alice, who were in two weeks ago. we had some great fishing and had a great time.

Alice, on the right, is an absolute stick. she's been fishing longer than i've been alive, and it is really fun to fish with her. shortly after the above photo was taken, we turned the boat back toward camp for lunch. we were the last boat on the water, so a little behind the others, but Alice would not cross the lake without her fly in the water. before we opened up the motor, i asked her how long she had been married to Terry, who was in the other boat with Kathleen and Les, the other guide on the Lakes that day. she said 46 years, and the three of us got into a relationship conversation that i contributed mostly nods and laughs to. four or five times, as we crossed the lake, during the middle of this conversation i was trying to pay close attention to, Alice would get a hit and that would stop her mid-sentence as she set the hook hard into a brookie or cutty and then yell some expletive if the set was missed or hoot/holler in some way if the hookset was successful. it was quite a sight.

we had some crazy rains this afternoon. the creek looks like it may spike in flow which means tomorrow's fishing is going to be nuts. not that it isn't already.

got some of my absolute favorite guests at the ranch currently. going to take em fishing tomorrow.

and net some fish for em!

floated the rio today, a good, long float, 7ish house. jesse had a rough day on the stick today. but that's good, makes me wanna fish again!
above, cousins tie on a new fly. i hope/trust these boys will be fishing together for a long time. glad i was a part of their fishing lives.

ugly casts catch fish too

ain't that the truth.

a week and a half of guiding under the belt. first week i had some familiar faces on the water - folks i took fishing last summer. the fishing was very good, lots of action subsurface and even a few takes on top. for six clients last week, i was able to net a fish on their last cast of the trip. nice!

we see a lot of rookies here on the ranch. sometimes it is hard to get them to hook fish and then even harder to get those fish to my net. what it is. ugly casts catch fish too and when i've got a client by my side and we're in the middle of a run, we will eventually get a good drift that will a fish will eat.

the first half of this week has been a slightly different story. we have a group of kids, aged 8 - 16, in for 3 full days of fishing. we had these kids last summer and they're great boys, but beginning anglers. it's been windy for a while and that doesn't help. i had one of my worst, catching wise, trips to date on sunday, where my only fish of the day was a 6" brookie on the last cast of the trip. yesterday afternoon's trip saw two fish in the net. this is frustrating and stressful because these kids just want to catch fish. and they don't hesitate to let me know that fact. and then as soon as the trip's over and all the guides rendez-vous with the boys back at the lodge, the first questions out of every boy's mouth is "how many did you get?" "i got X fish and they were Y inches!" i wish i could've written down some quotes from the creek the last few days.

"man this is frustrating."
"i NEED to catch a fish."
"so-and-so got so-many fish yesterday and i haven't caught one yet!

and then there's the never ending stream of questions.

"do you see one?"
"are you putting on a dry fly?"
"do fish eat actual flies?"
"how far can you cast?"
"how many fish do you catch?"
"can you take me to a good spot?"
"is this a good spot?"
"do you see one?"
"can we use a stonefly?"
"how big was that fish?"
"do you see one?"
"i would've had 6 fish if i hadn't lost those four."
"wait wait one more cast!"

and so on. i actually counted because i was curious and in one afternoon's trip i lost exactly 15 flies. with three kids of near-beginner status who all are so eager and excited to fish, it's easy to be convinced to let two go ahead and fish a hole by themselves while i stay with one. inevitably the other two return to my side in a matter of minutes either with no flies, a huge tangle or both. but, deep breath, that's guiding. i'm outside in a trout stream all day and that's a good thing.

netting fish for the most excited clients of the season is pretty good too.

meanwhile, good casts catch fish as well. the rio grande is fishing pretty good. been floating a fair amount and hitting some fish with big salmonflies, sized 2 or 4. les landed a 5 pound rainbow on a salmonfly on friday. very solid. we forgot the camera so we had a feeling we might see a big fish that day.

the eve

tonight is the eve of guided trips.
in preparation we've been doing a lot of what we describe to other staff as "stream research." i've seen and fished each and every of the 15 stations on Goose Creek, as well as the Lost Lakes, the three ponds on the ranch and our small, meandering stream, Walton. and caught fish in 'em all.
i've been thinking about tomorrow morning's trip pretty much since i left the ranch last october. office work this winter gave me ample time to think about this summer's trips and tomorrow they begin. i know some stations have a little more holding water in the current conditions, but part of me is an 'i don't give a shit' attitude about where i go or who i take. i know how to catch fish on this creek. i've seen this creek in flows from 300 CFS to 40 and i've caught on all the flows in between. i was telling Drew this earlier but before every trip i have extreme ups and down of excitement. right now excitement is high. i want to hit the creek hard, fish each hole hard and hammer fish.
but hammering fish has its own ups and downs. for us guides at the 4UR, it's not a great idea because we have to guide the same water all summer. it's not fun to guide a station in the afternoon that someone hammered the morning before. hammering fish is also a little unrealistic for rookie anglers. who would take away all the times they were learning to fish and got skunked? after all, it's called "fishing," not "catching." but, i am a fishing guide. i supposedly guide anglers to fish and guide those fish into my net. i am paid to do that. it's my job. why wouldn't i want to do it extremely well, and hammer fish. if my tip is $50 when my client lands a dozen fish or $0 when we land 1 or 2, why the hell wouldn't i want to put a dozen in the net?? but again, fishing is more than catching fish. it's casting. it's reading water. it's enjoying the outdoors, finding freedom in the water. i want my clients to have fun and i think that's the bottom line. sometimes the fishing absolutely sucks. even when it does, i have fun. maybe that's what i'll try to convey to my new anglers this summer, is just to enjoy their time on the water. i mean, who wouldn't?
it's always nice to feel a tug on that line and land a few though. i'll try to do a little of that as well.
even though i've been on the ranch for more than three weeks, the season and the summer starts tomorrow. all the guides are in my room right now and we're pumped. can't wait for that alarm to go off tomorrow morning. chances are i'll be awake before it goes off anyway.
got some familiar faces to see next month. looking forward to that a lot. i hope everyone's well!

For You Are Ranch

so. i made it to the ranch. white lightning rode true the whole way and carried my smiling face right to the doorstep of the Bunkhouse, where i now lay my head each night. been here for a little over a week now. as of today, we've had four days of hot sun and the runoff has definitely started. didn't fish the creek today but in the past week and a half, it's been on fire.

there's a funny little game we guides play on this creek when we fish it ourselves. we've got all these money flies that definitely will catch fish, period. but we don't want to break out the real good flies yet because we will have to guide it soon, and get fish to eat. so i personally have been fishing woolly buggers. white and olive, straight from my tying vice. the fish like them. it's an easy tie and a great attractor pattern that not many fish will turn down. the other thing we do when we fish the creek is not beat it up. we get to the runs that we know hold fish, cast our woolly bugger or stonefly, hook a fish, land it, and move on. it's a funny little game we play.
above, fellow guide and roommate Drew, from wisconsin with a great goose creek wild rainbow. ranch life is good. a little different from last year, where everything was new. i've seen this creek a lot already, i know the chores we do often, i know where the tools are, where to drive to do this or that. there are a lot of new people here. it's interesting and fun to see them experience the 4UR for the first time. it's also great to hear Drew's thoughts on guiding for the first time. we've done a little philosophizing, brain saucin' if you will, about guiding vs. fishing. good stuff there. more to come on that.
weather has been pretty wild until a few days ago. in any one day we'd see sun, rain, snow, hail and wind. it's been sunny the past several days but the wind is still kicking. hopefully it dies down a bit before guests arrive, which is a week from today.
above, fellow guide and 4UR vet Les with a great brownie caught way upstream on station 13. not often we see browns that big that far up the creek.

i like fishing. and guiding. it's a great feeling to have someone you're guiding hook, fight and land a fish. seeing someone get so excited about catching a fish is priceless. sometime i forget about that, especially when i'm fishing on the creek or out west. there are so many hungry fish here that it's easy to get into almost a serious mode when fishing: cast, hook, land. cast again, hook again, land again. i should be more appreciative of the fish i catch. i'm really kinda spoiled in that regard. that was one thing i didn't want guiding to do to me - make me not want to fish.
so that's about all for now. stay tuned. i hope everyone's well!

"Ur all heart man. Its your best and worst feature home boy."

-text from the Big Man

"Hey Jesse, did you get your eye fixed?"

-Question from 9 year old Cole, son of the ranch manager.