New Record for Trout in One Day

      What an incredible day today!  My last day at work was yesterday so I am retired again.  I told my wife that I was going to fish all day long.

     When I got to Meadows Creek Pond in Roy, Utah I was told the fishing was slow.  At first I tied on a grey zebra midge and caught a few.  I tied on a black zebra midge and caught a few, then I tied on an olive fuzzy leech…and caught a few.  I have been working on a new pattern that I call the sexy chironomid.

     When I was TDY in Oman I found out that some of the Arabs there really like girls with bright red lipstick.  They used to ask me how it felt to work with such, “sexy girls.”    Normally, the chironomid pattern is tied with a rust brown body and silver tinsel for the body segments.  The fly tied with the rust brown body works, as a matter of fact, it works great.  If you have seen chironomid pupae in the water they are rust brown.  The only problem is that it’s good for four trout at best.  The tinsel and the body just come apart to the abuse of trout striking the fly, sometimes the trout strike really hard and it tears up the fly.  The sexy chironomid is tied with cherry red holographic tinsel for the body and silver wire for the segments.  I also glue the red tinsel down.  The silver wire helps hold the fly together if the trout are striking hard.  I glue down the tinsel because if the tinsel gets cut in half by a trout tooth and it’s not glued down the tinsel unravels and the trout won’t strike it anymore.  With the tinsel glued down the fly never unravels.  Today, I caught over 50 trout on ONE sexy chironomid.  As a matter of fact, I caught a total of 72 trout for the day.  A new one day record for me!

     There are some factors that helped me catch those 72 trout. 

     1)  I read the water.  While I was sitting on a rock wondering what fly to use next I noticed that it looked like it was raining on the water.  The rocks I was sitting next to weren’t wet and I wasn’t wet.  I also noticed that in the middle of every drop of what I thought were raindrops on the water was a bubble.  I got close to the water and saw bugs flying out of the bubbles and it dawned on me what was happening.  When aquatic insects begin to hatch out of the water their bodies fill with gasses.  The gasses help the pupae float to the top of the water and now I suspect the gasses also help the new fly propel out of the pupae case.  That’s when I realized there was a hatch in progress and decided to try the new sexy chironomid.

     2)  I played the chironomid.  When I say I played the chironomid I mean I pulled on my fly line to make the chironomid flop under the water.  When chironomid are hatching they squirm as they float to the surface, I added some movement to the fly.

     3)  I kept my fly line tight so that it was easier to set the hook.  Playing the chironomid does two things: helps me keep my line tight and flops the fly.

     4)  I stayed and fished.  The weather was frightful.  You could see a cold front moving into the warm front that was over us.  Its started hailing, raining, snowing and sleeting.  My fishing buddy John said, “Let’s go sit in the car.”  I told him I was there to fish, not sit in a car.  John and I had the lake to ourselves for several hours and the fishing was hot!

    Utah Department of Natural Resources (DNR) stocked the lake again while I was there.  I got some really kewl video of it too, really kewl.  As soon as I figure out how to edit out the cussing I will post it to my youtube.com account.  Anyone know how to beep out the cuss words?  Oh, and it wasn’t me cussing, I don’t cuss, it was the people around me staring, and cussing, in disbelief at the size of the trout that was being put into the lake.

     Here’s a few pics of some of the trout that I caught.

    One last thing, I don’t think John would forgive me unless I put in the pictures of the lake trout that he caught.  It was a really nice trout that he caught on a black spinner.