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On Saturday I joined my fly club, The Stanislaus Fly Fishers, at an outing to Beardsley Reservoir, After bay, and the Middle Fork Stanislaus. There were about 10 of us up there on Saturday, with a few more heading up on Sunday. I only made it up for the one day.
My friend Chris and I left the central valley at 4:45 and headed up 108. The road was practically deserted at that time of the morning and we made great time, arriving well before 7am. Chris had to staff the welcome station, so a friend with a boat invited me to fish for the morning on the lake. Chris and I made plans to fish downstream after lunch.
We decided to head up to the inlet and found that most of the other boats on the lake had the same idea. Still, it was not really overcrowded as we made our way up the ever-narrowing channel. We came up to a large layer of flotsam, and as we got right next to it we could see a massive school of large fish teeming around it. We thought we had hit the mother lode until we realized they were suckers! We fished in the vicinity anyway and I hooked a feisty 16” planter on a callibaetis nymph.
Having no further action, we decided to move deeper into the inlet. We finally got to the point where we could not go any further, and we dropped our anchor so we were right in the middle of the channel. Pat fished one side of the boat while I fished the other. I tossed my rig into a little side cove and hooked, and brought to net, another 15” planter rainbow. Pat hooked a nice, bright native rainbow buck (~18”), which fought very well, but came unbuttoned before we could get the net under him.
As we were heading back to the boat ramp we came upon another boat that was having engine problems and gave them a tow back in.
After lunch, Chris, I, and another friend, Derald, headed down the canyon to fish the river. We hiked down the steep, up and down trail on the right side of the river for ~25 minutes and then planned to fish our way back up to the after bay dam, leap-frogging each other. We passed a number of large (100 yards or longer) pools as we walked, with freestone sections between them.
We stopped at a likely looking freestone section. Toward the top of the section there was a nice run that ran down and disappeared around a house-sized boulder. Chris picked this run and planned to fish up, so I headed downstream 100 yards or so, and Derald headed on down further. I set up with a nymph rig, and alternated between tight-line and an indicator depending on the water I was fishing. I fished several runs on the way back up to the big boulder without so much as a grab.
I found that on the downstream side of the boulder there was a large sweeping run (really just the bottom half of the upper run) that created an equally large eddy, slowly circling back up to the top of the run to the left. The seam between the run and the eddy and lower pool was probably 45’ long and ~20 feet away from the nearest point to which I could wade. I worked the seam with an indicator on, from the bottom up, carefully probing every inch of water. I had a size 14 Copper John on top and a size 20 black Micro May on the bottom. I probed as much of the eddy as I could manage with the boulder blocking a lot of the upper section. After working the pool for ~20 minutes, I cast across the eddy to the upper edge of the seam and as it came back down next to the eddy, I got a gentle take, barely feeling the fish, but did not get a hook set. It didn’t feel like much of a fish, but it was more than I had so far. After another few casts, I got the fly back near the same spot, and my indicator went down, ever so slowly. The pool was deep enough that I knew it was not hung on the bottom, so I gently raised the rod tip until I felt the fish and then made a firm set.
I expected the fish to take off a bit, but it just sort of pulled away and down deeper into the pool. That was the first indication that it wasn’t a 12-incher as I had thought. I put some pressure on, the fish really dug in, and I could feel that it really was of good size. The fish pulled out into the current and started down the run, sweeping down to my right. I was using 5x tippet, so I had to let him run a bit, but when he got to the bottom of the pool and threatened to go down, I held on a little tighter and turned him around. I kept the pressure very steady to wear him down, but this fish had a lot of strength. I worked it back up toward me, along the edge of a large rock on my right, and as he got closer I finally got a look at him. He was very dark and very large, and at first I could see no discernable pattern and thought it must be a squawfish. However, as I pulled him in closer I could see that he had large dark spots and I could tell it was a Brown.
When it got close in, it spotted me and took off fast, upstream, finding the current once more. But the second time down the run I could feel that he was beginning to be played out. Another minute and I had him in the net.
It was a buck, and he taped out at 21 inches and the spots on his side were huge. I was attempting photo when he let me know that he was camera shy. He made it back to the water before I even got the camera turned on.
I felt very lucky to have the opportunity to be the one that landed a good one this trip. It will be someone else’s turn next time, so I will be savoring this one for a while.
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