Tuesday, November 10, 2015

2015 Fall Fishing Trip - Panguitch Lake Utah Area

This year Ken, Jimmy, Christian and I(Nate) planned a fishing trip to head up to our Panguitch lake cabin, and use it as a home base as we fished all around the Panguitch lake area. We stayed for 3 days and we hit up, Panguitch Lake, Asay Creek, Mammoth Creek, and Yankee Meadows. I never have been a big believer of the moon effecting fish's eating behaviors, however after this trip I think i'm convinced that after a Full Moon they just slow down. It wasn't the greatest catching trip, but it was a great fishing trip... Here's a report of the areas we hit up.

October 27th - 1st day

We got up to the cabin and settled and then headed down to some access points before Asay Creek meets the Sevier River. 
DWR's Site that shows access points on map. There were 4 of us fishing and we caught maybe 10 total but they were all pretty small. 6-12 inches. I think there was one that was 15 or 16. There is only a limited area that can be fished because there's private land all around. We think that it probably gets fished a lot. It was still fun and pretty! On our way back we headed back to mammoth creek road and stopped and fished on mammoth creek for about an hour. We all saw a lot of fish and we tried almost every type of fly but none of us caught any.




October 28th - 2nd Day

The 2nd day we decided to hope in our little fishing boat and try our luck dragging around some streamers on some sinking line. I've never seen it so slow at Panguitch lake, we fished for at least 3-4 hours and maybe landed 4-5 fish between all 4 of us. So then we decided to head over to Yankee meadows for the rest of the day and try our luck over there. Jimmy and Christian drove back through Brian Head with the boat, and Ken and I jumped on our dirt bikes to ride over the back way. Clear Creek Canyon has a dirt trail over from Panguitch lake to Yankee Meadows, but it's pretty rocky and pretty rough in some areas. There's a cool look off at the top where you can see Yankee Meadows, Brian Head Area, and the Valley, here's a couple pics that we took at the top.



Once we got to Yankee Meadows we scarfed down a couple hot dogs and launched the boat, we were having about the same luck as Panguitch lake. 

we saw a cool Bald Eagle over by where the stream comes into the reservoir and decided to get closer, as we got closer we saw a ton of flashes of red shooting off all over the place. The Brook trout were spawning next to the inlet. we stopped for a min. Since we scared them all a way we decided to take the boat back to the dock and get our waders on and go fish from the shore. We saw some fish feeding on little midges off the top so we threw on some different midges to test it out and no luck, we tried streamers, dry flies, and just about everything we had. Jimmy decided to try a egg pattern and finally landed a nice size brook trout in the spawn. Here's a pic of it.






We didn't know if it was a fluke at this point since we didn't have any luck with anything else so we waited to see if he could do it again. Sure enough he landed one even bigger! This one he could barely get his hand around it, it was so big. 

notice his hand can't fit around it.


At that point we all started trying to use the egg pattern. Here's one that I caught at the same place. 



Once it started getting close to dark, ken and I took off to head back to the cabin and Jimmy and Christian continued to fish a little longer and they caught a couple more, here's one that Christian caught after we left.

October 29th - 3rd Day

The 3rd day was a bust! We decided to go fish Mammoth Creek, right below the town of Mammoth. We hiked a couple miles and hardly even saw any fish. I think all of us saw about 2 or 3 fish total. none of us caught anything. 
After that Jimmy, Christian and I decided to give it one more go on panguitch lake, since we were getting sick of eating hot dogs, and we had planned to eat fish for dinner that night. We fished for about 3 hours, it started to snow and the wind was blowing about 20 miles an hour. But we were pretty sick of hot dogs so we kept fishing. We were able to land 2 pretty good sized fish that we took back and cooked up. I think they were caught on purple or maroonish streamers. 

All in all it was a fun trip, and great company!