I leave in a few days for a kamikaze solo trip to Colorado in which I’ll spend just under three weeks backpacking to as many 11,000-12,000 ft alpine lakes as I can squeeze in. I have the ultralight backpacking elements squared away, and the tenkara-backpacking proof of concept from the last trip. What I have no experience with or much preparation for is fishing alpine lakes, or stillwaters of any kind. I’ve read Jason Klass’s post on tenkara on alpine lakes, but that’s about as much received knowledge as I have. I plan to use the Keen sandals and neoprene socks to wade where possible. The main technical worry is casting range. I have 12, 16, and 24 ft floating pvc line purchased from Badger Tenkara. I used the 12′ line a bit near the start last year and in fact caught my first biggish wild brown using it. I’ll take the GM Suikei 39 and the Sato, and I guess I’ll see how casting extra long floating line goes. What’s not very clear to me is how to land a fish when the line and tippet are together twice as long as the rod. I guess you have to handline it (obviously), but just getting the line into a position that you can grab it doesn’t seem an intuitively obvious maneuver. Hopefully I’ll have an opportunity to figure it out.
Anyway, the other worry is fly selection. I guess buggers work, they work pretty much anywhere. And I’m decently set for weighted nymphs. But it seems like a lot of the action on lakes is dries, possibly sort of flipped from the normal situation on streams where subsurface will generally take more fish. I hadn’t tied a dry fly in my life, but I’m pretty set on the idea that I’m not going to buy any more commercial flies except in a pinch, and tie everything I fish with. So it’s time to have a go. The first pattern that gets talked up everywhere is the mosquito. They kinda look like an actual mosquito, and some people opine that it’s what they actually mimic. I dunno. Yes, mosquitos are everywhere, but I’m not sure they spend a lot of time on the surface of the water except when something goes dramatically wrong in their life. They don’t hatch in trout water, but in shallow stillwaters – bogs, standing pools, etc. The patterns seem to basically be colour variations of a classic Catskill mayfly. The most widely used one seems to be black thread, a grizzly hackle fiber tail, a stripped grizzly quill body, grizzly tip wings, and grizzly hackle. I’m short on time and skill, and it seemed a bit much to jump in with learning both hackle tip wings and quill bodies, so I’m trying to crank out simplified versions, with a black thread and extra fine silver wire rib body and omitting the wings. I dunno, I guess they more or less look like dry flies. I’ll see what the fish think. I’m cranking out a bunch in sizes 14, 16, and 18. Using Whiting 100s keeps it modestly idiot proof. I figure if they’re a bust I can always stop into a fly shop in Colorado and remedy the situation. With limited time, I’m planning to concentrate on these and a whole bunch of stimulators. If I have time I’ll try to tie some other attractors, like wulffs or humpies. I figure I’ll mostly fish tandem flies, sometimes with a weighted nymph dropped beneath a stimulator. I have a few commercial dries in larger sizes, including some Royal Coachman, Adams, BWO, and a few deerhair caddis.