Chevelon Canyon Lake

Headed out to Chevy last weekend with a small group.  The weather was beautiful, which is the opposite of what we were looking for.  In my experience the worse the weather in October, the sooner the Browns start staging for the spawn.  With water temps around 55 degrees, there is still a couple of weeks until the browns will start to show up.  We obviously encourage everyone to leave the spawning fish alone once they enter the creek to do their thing.

The fishing was really good for rainbows in the 10-16″ range.  There is a big fathead minnow hatch that happens in September and the shorelines are just teaming with tiny bait-fish.  We used size 12-16 simi leeches in various colors, but white and peacock seemed to produce the most fish.  The lake was also stocked with 20,000 “sub-catchable” fish about 6 weeks ago.  Not sure about the sub catchable part as we caught many of these small fish.  We decided to throw some larger Diamond Hair Minnows that looked like Rainbow Trout.  I had a couple of big bumps on these flies fishing deep with a Type IV line, but could not seal the deal.  Some of the others in the group did land some bigger rainbows on this fly.  Everyone caught around a dozen fish a day with many, many more fish missed.  Did not take any pictures of the bows as I am sure everyone has seen enough 10-16″ rainbows.

 

Since the browns had not shown up yet, JG and I took a day to explore some other water in the area known to hold large Browns.  It is one of those places that are only accessed by lots of work and rarely mentioned to anyone.  After a long 4 x 4 ride in and a few mile hike, we found a flat that had several Browns over 20″ milling around.  We spent 40 minutes just watching these fish, then we finally figured out their pattern and gave them a shot.  I hooked a 14″ bow on my first cast and within minutes JG was hollering for the net.  The pictures do not do this fish justice, it was 21″ and pretty fat with just some awesome colors.  I hooked a 24″+ fish a few minutes after releasing JG’s, but was not in the cards this weekend as it broke me off.  It was still worth the hike to see JG catch the largest brown of his life.  Both fish took a rubber legged mid bead Simi Seal Leech.  A great way to end the trip.