A Good Day of Fishing

This week will be an abbreviated update on river conditions as things are getting busy but I wanted to get this one out regardless!

There is also a river report by Adam from when he managed to get out of the brewery to go fishing on Holiday Monday.

River Conditions

The fishing has been quite good and the rivers are in great shape for this time of year.

The black wooly bugger has taken quite a few fish on the Crow in the last couple of days. And even this little brown was fooled on the surface with an Adult Salmonfly imitation.

However, I don't think there are many adult Salmonflies around yet.

But the fish are definitely seeing the nymphs subsurface.

It may be that this years emergence will intersect with good water clarity and we will have some fun dryfly fishing..

Who knows..

However, as I write this there has been a good amount of rain thats fallen and the rivers are more coloured up than they have been in the last couple days.

But I suspect they will clear up quickly provided we don't get another dump (not saying that wouldn't be a good thing!).

Anyways the fishing is beginning to get better so shoot us some pictures if you make it out!

After letting everyone else have all the fun for the last couple weeks, my brother and I finally got out to the river for a bit of a fish on Holiday Monday.

For the always anticipated “May Long,” Mother Nature did not disappoint.

The weather was beautiful in the high 20’s and it didn’t snow!

People were out in droves, getting some much needed outdoor time, especially around Lundbreck Falls day use area.  

However there were not as many anglers as I expected there to be, which is good since we were looking for an unmolested stretch of river to fish.

We did not run into another soul on the lower stretches.

River conditions on the Crow have been at early season levels, though when I say early season they would compare better to the end of June not the end of May.

The flows were in the 10.6m/s range on this day.

At this flow you can’t wade anywhere you want to yet, but you can get around in the river without too much worry of being swept away.

Water clarity was really good at a solid 3 + ft.

After arriving at the river I decided to push my luck and wade out into some pushy mid stream current to get at the first bucket I wanted to fish.

It was a slack pool right behind one of the many wing dams on the Crow.

The current was pushing hard mid stream, and because I was on the opposite bank from where I wanted to fish, I had to wade out into the main flow to get a cast across.

With the rod held high to keep line off the water I mended like a mad man to keep the flies deep. The first pass through resulted in nothing.

The second pass was a repeat of the first, only this time my indicator jerked under and took off downstream!

The second I came tight to the fish, it was airborne. It made a couple more short runs before I netted a nice 15” chrome bright rainbow.

Pretty good start.

We nymphed heavy rigs with Black Wooly Buggers and big Stonefly nymph droppers for a couple hours.

In total we netted 6 fish; three rainbows, a couple browns and a small Bull trout. Every fish took the Black Woolly Bugger.

I expect there are still plenty of Rainbows and Cutthroat in spawning mode although we didn’t find any Redds.

Regardless we avoided spawning gravel type areas and fished just the buckets.  

Perhaps the fish in the lower river have congregated closer to the falls.

Anyways, it was a good day to escape the brewery and regain some sanity at the river.

You should get out and enjoy the spring fishing!