Before getting off social media, I asked a friend for tips for fishing for trout in lakes. I took his advice and we decided to try it out. We don't often find ourselves fishing lakes, we enjoy the more intimate streams, moving water. Fishing for trout in lakes is more like bass fishing. Lakes around Southern Colorado get fished really hard as well which makes it a bit more difficult to work up the energy to go fight the crowds. We knew that the earlier we got there the better your chances are of getting to the fish first. We arrived around 9 in the morning and fought the wind all day. We were the only ones for about an hour and soon it started filling up. T and I worked our way to the opposite side and distanced ourselves from each other, trying to take up a certain portion so that anglers couldn't come cut us off. Sounds kind of greedy but hey we were there first.
This particular lake had a lot of downed trees. You could see T and I balancing on floating logs as we attempt to cast at huge cutthroats. It felt like a circus act. If you got the fish to bite you then had to continue to weave it in and out of the other logs. This created a challenge. If you missed the first few cutthroat cruising by you simply just had to wait and another group would be coming soon. Both days we went, we each caught a decent sized trout. We saw some huge brookies spawning by the inlet but they wouldn't even look at our fly, they were busy creating new fish.
I was fishing with a woolly bugger and trying to fish it parallel with the downed logs drawing the fish out from underneath them. I missed several simply because of my positioning. I didn't wear waders and only had on my rubber boots so I was limited to how I could align myself to the fish. After a few minutes, I hooked into a beautiful brook trout. My personal best. He fought like hell, I had to literally hoist him up over the logs to get him to my net. To say I was excited is an understatement. I was jumping up and down and yee-hawing my butt off. I'm pretty sure everyone at the lake knew I caught something. M helped me capture a few photos, I was so excited I started trembling. What a ride that was.
After our successful trips to the lake, I hope we become a little more open to fishing them. It's much easier and safer with the girls as well. Its something I can handle a little more on my own while T is at work. I'm so happy we tried something different and learned from this great experience. I'm practicing my skills at lake fishing in hopes to one day reach my goal of hiking a total of 13 miles to a high alpine lake which holds hefty wild Rio Grande cutthroats.
