Yankee Meadows Nov 2018

We finally got out to do a little fall fishing. The weather was great other than it being 29 degrees. We put our footage together in a little video to show the fun time we had! Thanks for watching

Yankee Meadow Spawners

Ken and I love to catch brookies!  We ran up to Yankee Meadow Reservoir last Thursday Nov 3rd and we were able to fish for 3 hrs before we had to be back in St. George for some meetings. The weather was great, a little bit of snow on the ground in the shade, it was beautiful up there.  We caught probably 10-12 fish and we caught them on a variety of things.  We started out catching them on wolly buggers; Purple and Olive.  We later caught the rest of them on egg patterns, in particular, a glow roe.  Here are some pics from our trip!

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!

Minersville Reservoir and Yankee Meadows Reservoir

Jimmy, Nate, and I have been itching to do some fall fishing. We had an opportunity to go on Thurs Sept 19th. We had such a fun time at Minersville last fall that we thought we would give it a try. Jimmy drove down from SLC and I drove up from St. George to meet him there around 7:30 am. We fished for about an hour and half with no bite. I think we were a tad too early. I guess that is what you get when you are impatient. The water temp was about 65-67 degrees still so it is no wonder the fishing is still kind of slow right now. We tried streamers, and midges, no dry flies. After an hour and half with not even a bite we decided to run up to Yankee Meadows Reservoir. Nate was just on his way up since he couldn't get away as early so we called him and told him to meet us at Yankee. Yankee is significantly higher in elevation 8,660 according to the DWR website. Here is the DWR webpage for Yankee it can give you a little more info:
http://wildlife.utah.gov/hotspots/detailed.php?id=1154783537

The water temp was about 55 degrees which I hear is when the trout start perking up and becoming more active. We fished for about 3 hours and caught 11 fish so it was a lot better than Minersville. They were hitting purple, green, and black wooly buggers. We caught around 5 bows, 5 cuts, and 1 brookie. It was gorgeous up there as the leaves were changing and it seems like fishing will pick up in the next couple of weeks as it gets even cooler. Also you will probably do better with midges in the next couple of weeks. Here are few pics from our trip.

Yankee Meadow Reservoir 11.5.2012

You couldn't ask for better weather in November!  Jimmy was down in St. George this weekend so we decided we would try and get out for a quick fishing trip. We ended up running up to Yankee Meadow Reservoir at around 12. It took us an hour and half to get there. We were surprised at how many people were fishing on a Monday afternoon in Nov but I guess when its 60 degrees at 9,000 ft in Nov people get the same idea as you. The brookies were in full spawn and trying to run up a little inlet on the south side of the like. I caught the first brookie on about my 5th cast of the day on a green bugger but we caught all the rest of our fish on the famous Black Jack tied by Gill Rowley of http://flytying123.com/ and  http://gilflyfishing.com/ We had a lot of fun and will be using this fly again this winter. Here are a few pics from our trip.