As I’ve noted many times here, the first time fishing on new waters can be an exercise in frustration – you don’t know the flies, or the techniques, or how the fish are going to behave. And it’s plenty easy enough to get skunked. Which stinks well enough when you’re near home, but stinks even more after you’ve driven 700 miles to get to “the best water in the lower 48”.  In general I’ve concluded that it’s best to enter new waters with reasonable (read: lowered) expectations.

So, what do you do when you fish a new place, different water, different techniques, and… you have a great time, and catch more big fish than you’ve ever caught in one outing? Well, the first thing you do is to say “Thank you Alan!” Alan who has been a rod-making mentor and friend for years, and who took the time to re-rig my leaders, hand me a box of flies, show me the spots, show how to mend for the tricky drifts, and finally, take pictures of me holding big fish. This is the first one I caught. It’s fuzzy because the camera just came out of the water…


Gray Reef is a tailwater on the North Platte, and in that respect it’s maybe a typical tailwater: millions of small bugs, virtually no rises, fast water, long leaders, heavy weight and small flies, and big, fat fish. You spend all your time watching an indicator, and the takes can be subtle, or vicious, more often subtle. Aside from egg patterns, the biggest fly we used was a size 20, and black was the name of the game for us. Another character on the river, “Automatic Bob”, was slaying them with a tiny sparkly green midge concoction, about size 22. Once you have the flies, weight and depth down, then it all seems to come down to drift. The first day, I couldn’t get it, and I was cussing Glenn who was pulling them out of the same run I was uselessly casting into again and again. Here’s Glenn with one on the line.


I don’t nymph that often, and basically not by preference, but one thing I do know about it is that sometimes, and it will happen eventually if you stick with it, you get into a groove where you’re just tuned in: you’ve got  your mends down, you set the hook when the indicator ticks, or it sinks where it hasn’t before, or you often do it without knowing why, and virtually each time a fish is one the other end. Alan was in that groove, and I don’t know how many fish he netted. Here’s one of them:

Check out this video of Alan with another:


On the subject of netting, before arriving I was told that if you’re counting fish, you count hook-ups, because you might only net 30% of these fish. The rest of the time, they’ll wrap you around something underwater, or jump and get off, or bend your hook straight, or loop downstream from you in the fast water and shake their heads until the hook pulls loose (which they do consistently). My observation is that the big boys are better at getting off than the “small” fish, and you end up having to be pretty good in all aspects of the contest, when you’ve hooked one of the big ones, if you’re going to net him. For instance, one of the guys fishing while we were there seemed to lose all his tackle every time he had a fish on. Was he playing them too hard? Or were his knots weak, giving out as soon as they were put under stress? In the fast water, and with the big fish, I think a 30% netting rate is excellent – in the slower water, I think the guys did better than 30%.

So how big were the fish? The biggest fish I saw caught was 27 inches or so. Plenty were between 16 and 20. Here’s Alex with a nice fish.

And one of the striking things is, the SMALLEST fish I saw was maybe 14 inches. No dinkers here, boy.
Even the small guys were built like linebackers, with big shoulders and slabs of muscle.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the longer bamboo rods (8-1/2 foot and longer), once I cast some of the best 7- to 8-foot tapers out there, but this is one piece of water that requires some length – not just for mending, although that helps, but also because you need leverage to lift 10 feet of leader with 3 or 4 BBS on it, out of the water, before you can even begin to cast. Not to mention the Wyoming wind, that can tie your leader into a Gordian knot with one extra false cast. The more efficiently you get the leader out of the water, backwards and forwards where you want it, the better. A Dickerson 8615, which Alan swears by, is now in the plans.  Glenn was casting one of Alan's Payne 104s, and that was a beautifully-casting  rod for those waters, as well.

Once again, thanks Alan, Glenn, Joe and Alex.
Lee

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