Deckin’ Em at Deckers

Colorado in the summer. Snowing four inches one morning, 75 at noon, chilly rain at night…Yeah, that’s predictable. However, one constant does remain – there are always fish to be caught. On this early June day, I got off of work a couple of hours early and decided to hit Deckers and see if my local honey holes would be holding any big rainbows or browns.

It was the end of a week cold spell, and the last two days had been warm and in the sixties, but not abnormally hot. However, in waters that are highly pressured by fisherman year round, there are two rules to go by when fishing the summer time with no specific hatch going on:

1. The smaller, the better.
2. Deep pools are home.

With the sun up, and no hatch going on, I tied on a size 20 flashback pheasant tail along with a mercury midge, and deep nymphed two pools (to be unnamed). The end result: three great bows, and countless suckers. The rainbows were keying in on the midge, and it became difficult in the afternoon to get a drift into the rainbows without hooking a sucker. But for three hours on the water, I’ll take it any day of the week.

Joe Petrow with a South Platte rainbow
Joe Petrow with a South Platte rainbow

Joe Petrow with a South Platte rainbow
Joe Petrow with a South Platte rainbow

Joe Petrow
Joe Petrow

Channel Cats and Bass on the Trinity

So, here we are again. A typical Saturday morning – 8am wake up. Breakfast. Shower. Homework today? Possibly…What’s the weather looking like? Sunny and hot…hmm. No homework. Fishing? Yep.

Although I fly-fish on the Trinity River next to TCU frequently, this specific trip was one for the year. I have caught countless numbers of carp and largemouth in this river, and although it is overlooked by many fisherman, the potential to catching monsters is there.

On this certain day, not only did I land my biggest largemouth ever, but I also caught one of the mystery fish that I had only heard about in the Trinity: a channel cat. And not just one. But three.

After a slow start of throwing a huge “Grub Bug” as I like to call it, I felt my line go tight on the crawdad impersonating fly, and there was no budging on the end of the line. I immediately was assuming a potential channel cat in that nothing was happening in the fight, but then out of nowhere, the fish ran and I saw the 7+ pound largemouth jump. After multiple “woo hoo’s” from cyclists passing by, and ruining my neon yellow Nikes by jumping into the river, the bass was landed. After asking a nice elderly lady to take a picture, evidence was made, and the pic is now below. Four more bass were caught on this day as well (pic below).

Later on in the day, the same thing happened: casts right along the bank, smashing hits, no budging. This time, the channel catfish emerged, and there was another species to check off the list. The trick to catching this guy is to let the fly sink fully, and then to do extremely fast and sporadic movements to attract the fish. These fish are actually voracious predators when the water temp increases, thus this day was one for the books.

Joe Petrow with a giant Trinity largemouth
Joe Petrow with a giant Trinity largemouth
Joe Petrow with a Trinity River channel catfish
Joe Petrow with a Trinity River channel catfish
Joe Petrow with a Trinity River largemouth
Joe Petrow with a Trinity River largemouth

Colorado Pike on the Fly

On an early June morning, myself along with my two life long best friends (Ryan and Jax) woke up not knowing exactly what kind of fishing we wanted to do. After making some coffee and waking ourselves up, we knew that it wasn’t going to be a trout day. With the weather in the mid 80s, and virtually no cloud cover, we knew that it was a warm water species kind of day. However, Jax and I had been on a virtually non-stop carp week so we didn’t want to do that. Our one result – how about pike?

I had fly-fished at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal before for pike and had not had too much luck, but the weather looked good, we had the flies, and we thought why not. So we loaded up the Jeep, drove to the arsenal, and started our day extremely early.

My buddy Ryan decided to throw a spinning rod off of the shore for the day while Jax and I decided to go to the east end of the lake and start wading and blind casting. On my third cast, BOOM. A monster hit almost tearing the rod out of my hands because I was not expecting it, and a 31 inch northern pike was landed. Pretty unbelievable catch – we had been fishing our huge yellow and red bunny streamers parallel to the bank, but this guy was caught about 30 feet off the bank in a deeper section.

Once afternoon hit and the sun was up, I tied on one of my go to saltwater flies: the gummy master. This minnow impersonating fly looked excellent in the clear flats, and it was the only fly that the spooky pike would eat when the sun was up. 5 pike were caught on this.

At the end of the day, seven northerns were landed and the day was well spent.

Joe Petrow with a huge Colorado northern pike
Joe Petrow with a huge Colorado northern pike