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Catching a perfect drift near south fork
The Rio Grande has bounced back big-time, and few know it!
For more than eight hours they had come flopping steadily over the gunnel, these brown trout of the Rio Grande River.
For a couple of visitors from the Front Range, it was a rare chance at angling gluttony, one of those special days that comes along every two or three years, provided you really work at it.
Immersed in the rhythm of all this fish catching, the interlopers from the east hadn't taken time either for introspection or analysis. Now, with the day winding down and shadows sliding down from the La Garita Wilderness, an epiphany of sorts arrived suddenly to the raft ferrying them along.
"I've never fished a river where you got such long, natural drifts for your fly," the realization came to John Barr, who has seen a few in his time. "You get a perfect drift on almost every cast without even trying."
Perhaps it's accurate to credit nature's own hydrological engineering for such uncommon success. Get a good presentation, catch a trout. Oldest fly-fishing adage in the book.
Or maybe it was some special magic Mike McCormick applied to the oars. Or simply the fact that the Rio Grande contains a surprisingly dense population of fish. Or that most of these trout that occupy the stretch of Gold Medal water roughly from South Fork to Del Norte seldom see a fly or lure. Or that Barr's trademark Hopper-Copper-Dropper system proved irresistible. Or that the water level was just right. Or the sun, moon and stars were in perfect alignment.
Take your pick. Any two or three will do.
The one certainty is that, after two years of suffocating drought, the Rio Grande has made a Lazarus leap back to life. While most of the state suffered through another lean snowpack, the broad basin that gathers the third-longest river in the Lower 48 measured close to 100 percent of normal.
Even though a significant part of the snowmelt is being held upstream to replenish reservoirs drained during the drought, the flow last Friday still measured 550 cubic feet per second at Del Norte.
Irrigation demands and naturally diminished flows will cut the volume in half by late summer, when the window of angling opportunity begins to swing shut.
"We get water temperatures pushing 70 degrees when the water gets really low," said McCormick, whose family operates the Wolf Creek Anglers fly shop in South Fork (719-873-1414). "Most of the guides agree to stop fishing it, or at least not in the afternoon."
Whatever problems the Rio Grande might endure - fickle precipitation, up-and-down flows from irrigation drawdowns - fishing pressure is not among them. Fully 4 1/2 hours from the Denver metro, South Fork isn't exactly overrun with angling hordes. Much of the river flows through private property that goes largely unfished.
A certain amount of floating occurs, but nothing like the Avon hatches that choke most other Colorado streams. Friday's outing marked a case in point. At the peak of tourist and fishing season, these visitors floated some 17 miles without seeing another craft. Two trailers at a take-out point offered proof that others were on the river, but they didn't come into view.
If angling pressure on the Rio Grande is relatively light, it begs the question why Steve and Linda McCormick, Mike's parents and highly successful agri-business operators in their native Kansas, chose this spot two seasons ago to invest in a fly shop in the middle of a drought.
"We lived for a while in Carbondale, but there were too many people," Steve said. "Then we tried La Veta, but there was no fishing."
Much like Baby Bear's porridge, South Fork felt just right.
"It's not just the Rio Grande," Steve went on. "The river has 50 tributaries. There are more places to fish than you'll ever get around to."
Should those fail to impress, the McCormicks scurry off to the Conejos River, little more than an hour away.
Contrary to Friday's impressions, not everything is perfect about the Rio Grande. Although it ranks as one of only three Colorado rivers (the Colorado and Gunnison are the others) with a major population of the giant pteronarcys stoneflies, the hatch often appears erratically or gets drowned by rich, brown runoff.
Take the recent scenario in June, for example.
"We got three days of hot weather and the hatch suddenly came off all the way from Del Norte to Creede," Mike McCormick said. "It didn't last. It was over before we knew it."
This weird behavior by the big bugs probably was a hangover from a drought that left the river with an all-time low flow in 2002, then followed with only half of normal in 2003. Given that kind of punishment, a river and its insects can start acting pretty strange.
Yet not so strange that the trout refuse Barr's can't-resist rig, which seems to work just about everywhere. The Boulder fly-tying guru starts with a No. 6 B-C Hopper made from closed-cell foam he created with Westminster cohort Charlie Craven. As an active indicator, the hopper floats like a cork, excites strikes from the occasional over-ambitious trout and supports the second fly in the arrangement, the Copper John.
This heavily weighted nymph, which serves both as an attractor and mayfly imitation, sinks to the depths where most trout are holding. Barr then adds a dropper, a fly that imitates the likely nymph du jour. On this day, the selection was Barr's own Pale Morning Dun emerger, size 18. Most takes came on the emerger, but a surprising number grabbed a No. 16 red Copper John.
Perhaps the greatest deficiency on these downstream reaches of the Rio Grande is the lack of access. In the almost 50 stream miles between Creede and Del Norte, fewer than five are open to the public.
Then there's the size of the fish. Almost exclusively browns, the average catch is 12 to 13 inches. But a good percentage ranges between 15 and 17 and certain deep, dark holes fairly reek of hook-jawed trophies; a 29-incher was caught recently from just such a place upstream from South Fork.
But these are minor drawbacks for a river that offers so much. As Barr suggested, it's best just to go with the flow.
July 14, 2004
Section: SPORTS
Page: D-12
Charlie Meyers