South Park - Sunday, May 20, 2012

Scott and I met at the K&G at 4:30AM, gassed up my truck and the boat and were at the Gate at 6AM(ish). We hit the boat ramp by the dam and had the boat in the water at 6:30. Scott parked the truck and I held the boat while he fired Big Red up. Problem is, she wouldn't fire up. We tried for a good 40 minutes, drained one battery and the other was close to broke before we decided we would be ditching the boat and hiking in. We pulled the boat our of the water and in the parking lot we started tying her up - Scott straightened the engine and decided to give it one more crank - and Big Red started right up.

We got her back in the water and were over to one of our favorite spots at around 7:30. There were already 4 or 5 boats over in that direction, but no one directly in our spot. We anchored up and threw our lines in and it was slow. Scott ass hooked and landed two fish within a few minutes and it was just slow.

We fished multiple spots throughout the day. All areas produced hits, but they were very sporadic. Lots of smaller stockers found, lots of jumpers and fiesty fish, but nothing of any size or special - all were rainbows, all caught on chiro's of grey/black/yellow/tan.

The cool part about the day was the bugs - LOTS of huge chiros hatching, mostly grey and black with a chartruese ribbing (cool looking). The chiros were to be expected, but what wasn't expected was the callibaetis hatch - on the east side of the lake the callis were EVERYWHERE and huge - they were easily size 8 or 10's, and they were all over the water. I tried a calli pattern to no avail. I did not see the fish hitting the surface taking callis. We did see lots of fish slapping the surface on the west side - but no notable slurps - mostly just jumping. Lots of 6-8 inch fish doing aerials out of the water about 50 feet from the boat. Maybe the fish were full from the week or two prior of a full menu of chiro's??

Honestly the trip was disappointing - our hopes were an epic chiro hatch with the fish taking our flies easily. I think we missed that first hatch that makes the fish nuts, and we may be in summer mode in South Park already. Water temps were 55 degrees all day. The weather was very nice, a low cloud cover took until 9am to burn off, then it was mostly sunny all day long - the air temp rose all day and the winds stayed down all day as well. Very nice day to be on the boat.

Catch of the day was finding a bell anchor attached to our anchor.

I think we caught 20 fish all day - most in the 14-15 inch range, a few much much smaller and maybe 3 fish in the 16-18 inch range. Like I said, nothing special.