Provo River Massacre

My brother-in-law met me at the mouth of Provo Canyon around 8:30 am. The forecast called for temperatures in the low 50's with increasing wind as a storm front would be approaching around mid-day. I was a little worried about the wind the day before but so far the day looked promising. We drove up the canyon, parked, and luckily did not get stuck in the snow or the snow covered vegetation during the small hike to my favorite hole. The winds were calm and I noticed some evidence of some small midges hatching as I set my brother in law up with a standard nymph rig. His lead fly was a beadhead hares ear with a black zebra midge (size 18) trailing it. We started out fishing the flies on the bottom. I gave him a quick run-down of the dynamics of the hole and let him have at it. Before I could get rigged up he had landed his first fish of the day. And before I seriously started fishing, he had landed about six fish, many of them coming on the hares ear of all things. I got in on the action soon enough and started catching fish.

The best trout of the day, not too big but he put up a good fight for my brother-in-law and he was not camera shy either

I was fishing a little variation of a fly I learned from a professor of mine as my lead fly. It was a black thread midge with ribbing, a little light colored dubbing, and a pearl glass bead. It was a size 16 and it was picking up all my fish at first. Eventually I started picking up some fish on my trailing fly which was similiar to my lead fly minus the glass bead and one size smaller at an 18. Soon enough the hatch started kicking in a little better with some fish rising, not enough to warrant the dry fly yet. I noticed fish moving upstream and podding up in front of us. They started feeding more aggressively so we suspended our nymphs toward the middle of the water column. When we did this it was lights out. We landed fish after fish for several hours. We soon lost count of how many fish we landed which was good. One dissapointing thing is that I noticed that most of the fish were "cookie cutter" small sized fish. Just last year most of the fish I caught out of this hole were twice the size, at least in mass. My brother-in-law caught the fish of the day which was the average size I caught the previous year. I think the reproduction has been too good, especially in this hole. I plan to keep two fish from this hole every time I fish here and see if I can do my part to raise the average size of the fish

Here is an example of the cookie cutter type fish that we pulled out of the hole time and time again

My brother-in-law and I somehow happened to both be looking upstream at the same time and we witnessed a strange phenomenon that got our blood pumping. We saw a huge brown sky rocket clear out of the water, almost like pre-spawning or caddis hatch behavior, but this was during a midge hatch! Several fish later, another huge brown shot clear out of the water right in front of us! It may have been the same fish, who knows? I couldn't figure out why these fish were putting on an aerial display, but we raised our indicators up our leaders and added a split shot and dredged the bottom for these beasts. If I was feeling more ambitious I may have even swung a streamer across the current. We think we may have gotten one good hit, and we got a snag we had to break off, but no 20+ inch monster brown to speak of. Just knowing there still are some hogs in the Provo makes me feel good. I used to tangle with fish near this size fairly often on the Provo about 5 years ago, but now too much of the biomass consists of fish, which means their average size is down quite a bit.

Another angle of the fish of the day, I love the bronze/yellow belly

Small but fat brown trout

The midge hatch never really went bananas, but it got some of the smaller fish smacking a few bugs off the top. I then decided to mix things up a bit and went to a dry-dropper rig. A Griffith's Gnat was the dry and I added an experimental emerger off the back. I tied some small midges with a small piece of orange foam tied in right near the head. I copied the idea from a foam emerger pattern I saw on the net. Ideally the foam should have been right in the film with the fly body vertical but I didn't think to grease the foam with floatant and/or used the wrong type of foam because the fly just kinda sank or washed around with the upwelling and current. Regardless, I soon was landing fish on my emerger creation and let my brother-in-law land a few too on my rod. The wind started picking up and after hours of catching fish we decided to call it a day. It was a memorable trip for sure, and it was a great way to bring in the new spring fishing season that will be full of midge and Blue-wing Olive hatches up and down the Provo River corridor. Until next time, tight lines!