Weather Beat Down

Sick as a dog, but desperate to get out of the house, I decided to make a quick run down to Deckers Wednesday afternoon to fish the South Platte below Cheesman Canyon. As I got about 10 minutes outside Denver the drizzle turned into an outright deluge and then came the hail. The hail stones pounding my tin can of a pickup made an absolutely deafening ruckus. The highway was covered with about 2 inches of white by the time it stopped. As I weaved my way into the mountains I passed through a few more storm cells and a lot more rain before finally reaching the river.

When I got there I was surprised to see that Horse creek was not puking mud into the Platte. So I suited up, ate a sandwich and walked down to the water. Standing on a high bank I could see several fish spread out on the shallow flats darting back and forth. I watched them for a few minutes and spotted a few fish sporadically rising to the surface. As I slowly made my way to the water I could see a handful of clumsy BWO mayflies fluttering off the surface of the water. So I rummaged through my boxes and picked out a nice looking dry fly, rebuilt my tattered leader and set about to catch a fish.

And catch a fish I did. A nice brown. Then another. And within an hour had caught a handful of nice browns - all on the dry. As I finally got to the top of the pool I was fishing, I spotted a few larger rainbows sitting on the shelf where the riffle above dropped into the pool. They were sitting in about 18" of water and despite the choppy water over the top of them you could clearly see them darting around to pick up food from the drift. I spent several minutes trying to coax them up to my dry before finally conceding that these fish would probably be easier to catch if I tied on a dropper. So I dropped an egg off my BWO dry and after just a minute or two was hitched up to a really good rainbow.

As I worked my way up river I watched a procession of cars leave. "Strange" I though, as I spotted fish in every corner of the river I peered into, some of which I even managed to catch. But then it hit me. At first I figured it was the deeper water I was fishing that made spotting the fish harder, or maybe my glasses had fogged up. But when I took the glasses off it was suddenly apparent. In front of my eyes, the river was starting to blow out. Over the next 10 minutes the clarity continued to drop until it looked like Guiness pouring from a tap. It was about then I decided a beer sounded really good and it was time to call it a day.