Labor Day Weekend 2017

Saw Jethro Tull at Red Rocks on Friday. Got up at 4 am Saturday and drove to Granby to fish for the rest of the weekend. The fish are really active back in Arapaho Bay. Diane and I both did really well. We caught a pair of 24"ers and a lot of 20-22" as well. The weather was nice. The lake was lower than I have ever seen it.

Cold Trip To Blue Mesa 5-18-17

First major trip of 2017. The weather in Denver and on the way to Blue Mesa was really nice. As soon as we hit Gunnison it started snowing. For the next 3 days the average temperature when on the lake was about 30F. Pretty cold. We still managed to catch a good amount of fish and had a good time.

Getting ready for 2017 season :D

Finally time to breakout the boat and get ready for the 2017 season. In a week and a half Diane and I are heading to Blue Mesa for 5 days. So this weekend I started the process of getting everything ready. De-winterized the boat. Changed the oil in the lower unit, got new tires for the trailer, start putting all the batteries back in etc. Put the muffs on the engine and it fired right up. By the time I had the boat ready to go in was close to 5pm so we decided to wait till tomorrow (Sunday) to take the boat out.

Gander Mountain was recently bought by Camping World :(. Camping World decided to close all the stores, liquidate all the stock, then reopen 70..? As of now, no store knows if they are in the 70 that will remain open. This makes me sad because there are not a lot of good sportsman stores left in Denver. Bass Pro Shops pretty much ran all the small places out of business, leaving just a few other large competitors. Bass Pro Shop is the worst... So Gander is having a giant sale. Diane and I finally decided to buy a Yeti cooler :D It's so nice, I think I will feel bad the first time it gets dirty :(

Sunday we took the boat out to Chatfield just to make sure everything was good to go. The day started out overcast. After being at the lake for about 2 hours the weather got nasty so we decided to call it a day. The boat did well and I feel it is ready for 2017. Now I just have to get all my fishing and camping gear in order.

Blue Mesa Reservoir 8-26 to 9-4

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.

Turn Around Trip At Granby

Took another trip to Granby from August 15th to the 19th. August can be one of the slower times for fishing at Granby due to the water temperatures. My first few days were pretty slow. I think I got 5 the first day, 1 the second day, and 3 the third day haha. At this point this was the worst trip I have ever had to Granby. The 4th day I tried a new jigging technique my friend Jeremy showed me. Instead of a slowish up and down of about 1.5 to 2 inches I normally do, I went with a faster 1/2 inch up and down motion. This basically all happens with the very tip of the rod. The backbone of the rod doesn't really move at all. With this new technique I caught 11 fish the 4th day. On the fifth day I tried a new spot I found on a flat sandy area about 70 feet deep. I caught 19 fish in 4 hours. Most of the fish were in the 18-21 inch range. I literally went through an entire package of jigs. The fish just destroyed them. I'm glad I was able to turn the trip around. The new technique I really think was key. The new St. Croix rod I have been using really shines with this new technique.

Blue Mesa Reservoir First Week Of August

Diane and I finally made it to Blue Mesa Reservoir! Blue Mesa is the largest reservoir in Colorado. It's 20 miles long with 96 miles of shoreline. The state record Lake Trout, weighing in at 50lbs, came from Blue Mesa in 2007. The lake is beautiful and offers great fishing. Only reason we have never been is it's about 5 hours away. When you consider the fishing it offers that's really not too far.

Wednesday about 3pm we left our house for Gunnison, Colorado. We decided to stay the night at a hotel in Gunnison since we would not get there till after dark. We made good time and arrived at Gunnison about 8pm. The drive is longer than a trip to Granby, but it's really a lot less stressful. Driving to Granby on 70, once you get out of Denver you have to drive up a huge incline to Idaho Springs. The whole trip the left lane is moving at 75 mph, and the right moves at about 25 mph. So it really sucks towing a trailer up to Idaho Springs. Then, once you get past Idaho Springs you have to go over Berthoud Pass! Berthoud pass is about 20 minutes of really tight switchbacks on a very exposed road. The summit puts you at about 11,300 feet in elevation. The trip to Blue Mesa has much much less incline and the only real obstacle is Monarch Pass. Is actually 5 feet higher in elevation, but the road is way less vertical and just feels a lot safer. Anyway, we spent the night in Gunnison then took off to make the 16 mile drive to the reservoir at about 5:30am.

At first Blue Mesa was a little intimidating because its a new body of water and it's so huge. New water always put me a little on edge for some reason hah. It didn't take long for me to relax. Once we had the boat launched and I was heading out of the bay I started to relax. We headed to the first spot of interest I had identified on a map. We fished in the Cebolla Basin in water about 85 feet deep. It didn't take long before I had two Blue Mesa lake trout :)

After that we hit a couple of other spots near by then decided to make the long haul to Sapinero Basin on the other end of the lake. I caught my very first Brown Trout ever there. I had no clue they would hang out in the deep water with lakers. Diane quickly caught two or three 20+ inch lakers. After that fishing was pretty slow for the rest of the day. We got rained on pretty much all day, but the wind was pretty calm... which was a REALLY nice break from Granby fishing.

The next two days fishing was pretty slow. This is pretty much expected when fishing for lakers in the hotter months of the year. I was marking lots of big fish on the sonar. They would come and look at our 2.5" radical glow jigs, then just swim off. We still managed to catch 5 or 6, but it was pretty slow. Our last day of fishing I started trying baits I don't really use often. Like jigging spoons and jigging raps. Fish did not seem very interested in them either. At that point I decided to try a huge 4" green tube jig with a heavy 3/4" ounce jig head. I had that jig in the water no more than five minutes and I started getting hard hits. I figured they were hitting the jig skirt so I pulled the jig up and modified it a little. I cut about 1/2" off the skirt then made vertical cuts up the tube jig to give the jig a lot of life in the water. Dropped it back down and had a nice 20" laker in a few minutes. We needed a break from the sun so we went in and had an early dinner. After dinner we went out again and fished for about an hour before the wind blew us off the lake. I used the green jig again and caught a nice size laker right away. As soon as I got the laker in the boat he threw up a large *green* perch in the boat. This was a major ah-ha moment for me haha.

I worked out that the smaller radical glow jigs we were using was getting reaction strikes from aggressive fish. It's a small jig that glows and we were working it pretty quick. It occurred to me that Blue Mesa doesn't really have mysis shrimp, so the jig probably didn't look like anything the lakers would normally feed on. So the fish would only hit it when they were feeling aggressive. When the fish were feeling lethargic at best they would ignore the radical glow, and at worst, they were probably scared off by the weird looking jig hah. The big green jig looked at lot like a perch. Because of the heavy 3/4" jig head I was using I had to work the jig a lot slower. I think this looked much more like a small perch dying. Most fish seeing a fish that they eat all the time dying in front of them will eat it. Even when they are feeling hot and lazy lol. So.. anyway, I remembered something I had known and used a lot in the past. I had just gotten into a rut using a pattern that had done so well for me in the past. Moral of the story, doing the same thing over and over, when it's clearly not working, and expecting different results is silly. Life lessons from fishing :)

We both had a really good time at Blue Mesa and plan on going back in two weeks.

Granby - July 25th

I got back from 11 mile on Sunday, then took off for Granby at 4 am the next morning. My friend Brett and I camped and fished for 4 days. We had a good time. Caught a lot of fish and mostly had good weather. Did get a bit windy a few times.. as you can see from the destroyed canopy in one of the pictures below. The new St. Croix rod I bought for jigging worked out really well. It has the perfect amount of flex in the tip.

11 Mile Reservoir July 22

Diane and myself went to 11 Mile Reservoir the weekend of July 22nd. I have a love hate relationship with this lake. My first three or four times I would go and fish for trout from the bank. Fishing was usually hot or I would get skunked. For the last few years I have been fishing for northern pike from my boat. This can be a really fun style of fishing. You basically cast spinners, jerk baits, and swim baits in and around all the weedy areas of the lake. Diane and I have caught quite a few big pike doing this. This trip that was not the case. I managed to catch one tiny fish and miss another bite. That was it for the whole weekend. Still had a good time being on the lake and camping. Figured out that the stiff Fenwick rod I bought for lake trout actually makes a great swim bait casting rod. Does pretty good for heavy spinners too.

My First MA!

Took me two years :D