By Dennis Smith –
Look closely at the Big Thompson rainbow that didn’t get away. You can see the tiny midge in its upper lip.March is often a blustery month along the Front Range, and the inherent wind can make casting a fly distinctly challenging if not downright annoying. Still, it’s difficult to ignore the pull of a river on a warm spring day, and if you twist my arm a bit I’ll usually give in to the urge, load up my gear and head for a creek somewhere.
We started at the lower end of the Big Thompson about two miles west of Loveland. The river was disturbingly clear like you naturally expect this time of year, the shelf ice had receded in all but the darkest reaches of the canyon and there was a good head of open, running water coming downstream, which I didn’t expect. That was encouraging. We hiked along a faint path and found fish rising in a long, deep pool about 100 yards upstream from the truck.
There were at least a half dozen trout feeding and they were coming to the surface pretty regularly. That was encouraging, too. But it also became clear quickly they were rising to midges. Not so encouraging.
Threading a wisp of leader material finer than frog hair through the eye of a hook no bigger than a bent eyelash is a pain, but it’s even more frustrating with the irksome wind. It takes patience, good eyes and a steady hand. I learned to deal with half of that problem by carrying a pair of 3.00 magnifying glasses in my vest, and the other half by using one of those little ballpoint pen-looking doodads that holds the fly while you knot it to your leader.
With that done, the bigger problem now was that, although the surface of the pool appeared to be as still as death, it was actually moving downstream at a deceptively fast clip. Trying to get a tiny fly in front of those fish in the wind was one thing. Trying to mend your line without freaking them out before the current swept your fly away was another. I’m not sure how, but eventually a fish swirled under my little midge emerger. I lifted the rod and hooked the first trout of the day. It was also the last. It charged up and down the river, jumped twice and spooked the hell out of every other fish in the pool.
We hiked upstream in search of more rising fish, but found none. On the way back to the truck, Dustin politely thanked me for screwing things up, and I politely reminded him he was the one who invited me.