On Friday August 26th we took off to Blue Mesa as our last major trip of the summer. I didn't get off work till 3pm, so we didn't get on the road till about 6ish. First part of the drive wasn't bad at all, we hit very little traffic. The last half of the drive was a little rough. I hate driving at night, especially when I'm tired. I had to drive on tiny one lane roads in the mountains, over Monarch pass. We made it to the hotel without major incident :) We did wait at the front counter for literally 15 minutes before the clerk decided to show up and check us in...
The next morning we took off bright and early and drove the 16 miles from Gunnison to the reservoir. We took the boat out to a small flat I found on the previous trip and caught all kinds of fish. Diane caught a bunch with her best being 22.5". After that day we had high hopes for the rest of the trip..haha. That night Diane broke out the rice cooker and made pork bulgogi. Who says you have to rough it when camping!
The next day fishing just sucked. We each caught two or three fish all day. I guess it should be expected in late August. The water temp was almost 70 degrees. I think most of the lake trout were hanging out in 120+ feet of water trying to stay cool. I don't really like to target fish over 100 feet deep. It's hard to control your lure and it's hard on the fish to come up from that depth quickly. Think of a diver getting the bends. To top off the slow day a huge wind storm came up. My boat is an open bowed 16' aluminum V-hull. It does pretty good in the windy Colorado reservoirs..but this was pretty scary. The waves were probably around 3 feet tall, but they were really close together and breaking out in the middle of the lake in 100+ feet of water. It took about an hour to get back, but we made it and took no waves over the bow or stern. I figured I should read up on some tactics for small boats in biggish water when I got home. Check out some of these videos of boats crossing bars if you're into that sort of thing :D Once we got the boat loaded we stopped at the restaurant at the marina to wait out the rest of the wind and rain. The waiter took a picture of us... you can still see me freaking out silently in the picture haha.
The rest of the trip was pretty slow. We always managed to catch enough fish to keep us interested, but it was still slow. Next year I plan on hitting Blue Mesa much earlier in the summer. In the middle of the week we drove to Telluride area to hike to Blue Lakes at the base of Mt. Sneffels. I'll put that in it's own blog post.
