Kolob Reservoir Fly Fishing Report 5/19/2012

Nice little 15 inch bow, pic doesn't do justice on how pretty it was :)

Well we woke up Sat morning from our campsite over near Blue Springs Reservoir, ate some breakfast and headed down the road to Kolob Reservoir to do a little fishing. The night before we got our butts handed to us and since the wind wasn't blowing we were optimistic that we were going to be able to do better.

We ended up parking on the damn at the south end of the lake and fishing on the damn and near the spillway along the shore line to the east. Last year Jimmy slayed it here with an egg pattern and could see all the fish spawning in the gravel beds near the spillway.

When we first showed up we all started using black and green buggers with no luck. So then we tried pheasant tails, zebra midge, trout beads, egg patterns, and some gnat looking flies with no luck. We threw everything we could think of with no luck. Everyone around us was having the same luck. Kolob Reservoir opened up to bate fishing this week so there were people using power-bait and spinners and minnows all with no luck.

The shore was riddled with the skins of literally millions or even billions of little skins of some kind of gnat or mayfly hatch or something. I wish I were better and knowing the different kinds of hatches. One of the guys said that that a couple of days earlier when this hatch was taking place that the fish were almost boiling on top of the water eating like crazy. We were thinking that fish were just really full and had maybe gorged themselves on this hatch that had taken place a day or two earlier.

The other frustrating thing is that we could see the fish cruising the shore line back and forth all over in the rocks and gravel beds by the spillway and were throwing everything we could at them with no luck. We could see the fish and they would always just follow our fly and then turn away at the last second turning their noise up at what were trying to give them.

It was Niels first time fly fishing so Nate and I felt bad that he didn't catch anything and get to experience catching a fish on the fly. So Niels had stopped fishing with my Dad and Nate and I were still just trying to catch those stupid fish that we could see right in front of us like 6 feet away. I switch to a brown and black bugger for one last try and threw it out I started to strip it in and then Nate was like come look at all these fish so I stopped stripping and started walking up the shore line to where he was. While I was walking to him I felt my line start to grab, I thought it was the bottom but low and behold it was a fish. The only one any of us actually caught the whole weekend. I was happy and of course my Dad grabbed his rod and said you got anymore of those brown ones? and started fishing again for a few mins ha.

I also talked to my Friend Kenny who was fishing on the other side of the lake that caught a nice little cut about 17 inches. He caught it on a dry fly that looked similar to the hatch that had just taken place. But that is all he caught too. So fishing was really slow. Too many bugs, a full moon, wind, and the Fish Gods were all stacked against us, oh well can't complain about being out on the mountain and throwing some flies!