Today is the last day of elementary school. I’m picking up James and heading out for two nights in the cabin, and the last Iowa fishing possibly for a good while. We’re not quitting fishing. Rather, we’re heading out west for good portions of the summer. First, we leave next Friday for a three week trip to Utah (fossil collecting for my work), Nevada (fishing a trout stream in the basin and ranges), Wyoming, and Colorado (one ultralight hiking/fishing trip each on different parts of the Encampment River). James is then off to Europe with his mother for three weeks and I plan to go hardcore high altitude alpine lake fishing in Colorado. Then when he returns in July the plan is to be off for several weeks fishing in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. But for now, I have several recent trip reports to catch up on, and we’re going to savour a last couple of days of familiar streams.
My go-to rig has become tandem nymphs, with a size 14 Frenchie and a size 14 bead-head hotspot killer bug hung off the bend. It’s just lethal. T’he above are pretty crude because my tying is at best a work in progress (but they catch fish like crazy, so…) but the sand and fluorescent orange ones in the top row are just slam-dunk killers. They get attention from trout in all likely holding water, period. The bottom row are experiments I’m going to chuck in on this trip. Three oyster and fluorescent pink (with huge 210 denier Danville thread, the only hot pink I have), black and purple (Pearsall’s silk; I wanted to make some “black and blue” but I don’t have any blue thread), black and red (70 denier Ultra thread), olive and chartreuse (3/0 UNI thread, the only chartreuse I have).
