First day of vacation

My first real day of vacation up here in Grand Lake I decided to spend the morning fishing the Parshall Hole. I know the hole pretty well (in the winter) and it is only about 30 minutes from the cabin here. I was planning on being awake and on the road at 5am, but after going to bed at midnight, that didn’t happen. I was about 30 minutes late and landed at the parking lot at 6am. Beautiful morning with fog in the low laying areas and it was about 39 degrees. The water was up but only slightly off color, but not as high as most years on this first week of July. As you can see, typical morning view – minus the 12 feet sections of ice on the banks like I saw all winter.



I think I landed 2 small browns around 6:30 ish, both had lip/mouth damage – which was disappointing. And then nothing until about 7:30 when it “heated up”. I think I landed 3 or 4 pretty quickly, including this dink that I hooked on a red wire worm that was twice as big as his head. I think I casted him 2 times thinking he was a twig or branch before I realized he was a fish. He was no worse for wear as he shot off back into the abyss.




I managed a couple of rainbows – including one decent sized one at about 15 inches that gave a good pull. I managed a decent brown at the end of the day, but I forgot my net and when I tried to muscle him in he popped off the top fly and temporarily hooked himself on the bottom fly, then popped off completely, But that was it. I saw one other angler around 8:30, he hopped over me to the top of the pool. I promised Jen I’d be home at a decent hour, so I was out at 9am and back to the cabin (after gas) at about 9:45.

Good start to the vacation.

That afternoon the kids wanted to go out on Scott’s boat (thanks for letting us borrow the boat Scott!!) and try fishing in Shadow Mountain Lake. I motored out to deeper water and anchored up next to some floating grass/weeds and threw a worm on the Barbie pole and the Transformers pole and each kid fished for a bit. Pretty soon Z’s bobber was under and we landed a very nice 15 inch rainbow that was a beauty. I did manage to fish some chironomids, which I didn’t get any hits, but when I was reeling in a fish hit at them on the surface – which was weird, so I moved Avi’s rod to that spot, but no luck. Soon after I got asked for my license by a DOW guy, and then he was on his way. The wind kicked up, the rain started a bit and the kids were bored, so we headed back in. Avi and I tried fishing off the dock at our cabin and Avi did get a hit from a dink, but it is hard to land them when they are that small. It started raining harder so we called it a day.





An even better ending to a great first day of vacation!!