On the first day of what’s become an annual springtime trip to the Frying Pan River, the trout were rising to what I assumed was a hatch of small mayflies known as Blue-winged Olives. It’s the first dependable mayfly hatch of the season and the reason we keep going back to the “Pan” each spring.
Earlier that morning I’d met up with Vince Zounek and John Gierach in Basalt and we headed straight for a stretch of water that’s been a reliable source of “olive” hatches over the years. When we got there, a lone fisherman was hooked up and playing a trout. By the time we rigged our fly rods up and got into our waders he was leaving the water.
“It’s fishing great. I left a few for you,” he said. Trout were still rising everywhere. It didn’t take long for us to spread out and get down to it. I was in a good spot and started catching fish right off. The few freshly hatched olive duns I saw on the water’s surface was all it took to convince me what the trout were eating, although I never actually saw a trout take one.
It wasn’t until later that I began to question what was really happening. There didn’t seem to be enough adult olives on the water to account for all the rising trout and the riseforms I did see didn’t look quite right. Also, the trout I was hooking up all took the emerger imitation I was trailing behind my Blue-winged Olive dry fly imitation. That didn’t fit the pattern of previous years. John said the same thing when I met up with him. The fish he caught had all taken a RS-2 trailed behind a parachute Adams. The trout might simply have keyed on more plentiful emerging olives or maybe they were taking hatching midges.
Who knows? We were catching trout, so why worry even if I wasn’t exactly sure what they were taking. By the time we headed back to the motel, it was all academic.
The next day was very different. We went to the same stretch of water and sat around waiting for a hatch that never really happened. It was tough going. We each caught a fish or two, but that was it. We were shaking our heads when we got together at the end of the day.
For our final day on the river, I had convinced myself that I wanted to go up to the base of the dam on Ruedi Reservoir and take a look at what Frying Pan River anglers call the “flats”. It’s a long straight stretch of smooth water known for holding gargantuan trout that have fattened up on Mysis shrimp that get sucked through the dam’s gates. The shrimp were stocked in Ruedi Reservoir in the 1970s as a food source for kokanee salmon that were also stocked in the reservoir.
As it turned out the shrimp migrated to the depths of the reservoir during the day and were unavailable to the kokanees, which are mostly daytime sight feeders. However, the trout in the river gorged themselves on the Mysis shrimp that passed through the dam. The trout’s growth rates were phenomenal. The rainbow trout in particular looked like footballs.
I hadn’t fished the flats for many years and just wanted to see what they looked like. I told the guys I wouldn’t be long and I’d meet them on the river later that morning. By then they had decided to also come upstream and fish a section of river just below the flats.
When I got to the flats, the water was so low that it appeared unfishable with the exception of a few troughs and channels. I didn’t spot any trout. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t heard anything about the “footballs” in a few years and wondered whether anglers still catch them.
I did see a few fishermen across the river at the infamous “toilet bowl”. It’s a deep pool of swirling water right at the base of the dam. Very large trout inhabit it and fishermen have been known to wait in line for their chance to catch one. I admit that I’ve never fished it, preferring to match wits with the trout sipping midges farther downstream toward the end of the flats. However, I should say those fishermen were catching trout.
In 2017 rumors circulated that sheriff’s deputies were considering enforcing trespass laws that would have excluded anglers from fishing the toilet bowl. The outcry from toilet bowl aficionados was so loud that officials from the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office, U.S. Forest Service and Colorado Parks and Wildlife, among others, quickly announced that fishing access to the toilet bowl would remain open, but paddle boarding, free diving, swimming and wading would all continue to be prohibited.
I didn’t stay at the flats very long before I headed downstream to find John and Vince. They were already on the water and hunched over in concentration like a couple of Great Blue Herons. John whispered to me that the trout were rising to midges and very picky about what they were eating. We spent the rest of the day there trying to convince them to take our tiny midge imitations. It took concentration and perfect drag free drifts to get the trout to even look at our flies. Most rejected them. A strong wind in the afternoon made it even more difficult.
By the end of the day, we’d all managed to land a trout or two.
“It’s a good day when you land a difficult trout and even better when one of them is large,” John said. He was referring to a chunky 16-inch rainbow trout he landed after it made several scorching runs across the river.
We were tired and beat up by the wind, but content. Catching just a single trout in those conditions was nothing less than a state of grace.
Visit EdEngleFlyFishing.com to see Ed Engle’s blog, “The Lone Angler Journal.”
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