December 22, 2021 – Pueblo Tailwater (The Chutes to the Flag Hole)
Flows: Fluctuating between 103 and 99 cfs.
Water Temp: 42F.
Water clarity: ~4’.
Air Temp: 37F @ 8:30a – 61 @ 4p.
Hatches: Midge 10a on throughout the day, BWO 11a – 3p (time we left the water).
Flies: #16 Red Copper John, #14 Green Caddis Larva, #22 Mercury Red Zebra Midge, #20 Flashback Black Beauty, #12 Chubby Chernobyl, #16 Guides Choice Hare’s Ear, #22 Grey Sparkle Wing RS2, #18 & #22 Chocolate Thunder, #22 Stalcup Beatis, # 22 Sparkle Wing RS2, and # 20 Red Midge Larva.
Top producers: Red Copper John, Sparkle Wing RS2, Flashback Black Beauty, Red Zebra Midge Larva.
The top of The Chutes.
There are some days when you ask the fly fishermen “how’d it go?” and the answers vary from “it was off today”, “slow day”, or something to that effect. This was one of those days. The fish just didn’t seem to want to cooperate. Just about everyone we ran into had the same response.
There was the stray guy or two who said they got three or four nice ones – in the 17” range. They were looked upon skeptically!
It was so slow that we even left the water early – thinking we could get a head start and beat the evening rush hour in Colorado Springs. As we were gearing down – one of the guys who said he got 4 nice fish walked by. He was leaving too.
We started chatting with him. The conversation kept going back to what was up with the river. Brian and I did catch quite a few fish – but most of them were in the 6” to 8” range. Other than that, I netted a 16” rainbow and Brain landed a 10” and 12” one.
So what was it? There was a full moon the past three nights. I’ve read articles about how the fishing is off after a full moon. Reason being is the fish can feed better at night under the light of the full moon – and aren’t feeding as much during the next day. Was that it?
Some of the fishing reports that I read always mention the barometric pressure. If it’s low – below 29” is considered low – then the fish are less inclined to eat. The higher the better. The air pressure was a bit above 29” so not sure that was it.
I mentioned to Brian that the fish’s metabolism slows in the winter. Pat Dorsey writes in his “Fishing Tailwaters – Tactics and Patterns for Year-round Waters” that in the winter a fish may eat only every third day when a good midge hatch occurs. Maybe that was it.
Brian thought about this for a bit, then said well it hasn’t been much like winter lately. We’ve been fishing the past few weeks with highs in the upper 50’s and into the mid-60s.
Hmm. He had a point.
That got me thinking – is there other factors that affect the fish’s metabolism. Maybe it’s a seasonal type thing. Like less light in late fall, winter, and early spring. So I did a little research.
I checked a few online sites. Fishbio was one of them. Its site is dedicated to Fisheries Research, Monitoring, and Conservation and Fish Biology and Behavior which had a blog on fish metabolism. NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) was another site. It’s a government site and had an article titled “Rainbow trout in seasonal environments: phenotypic trade‐offs across a gradient in winter duration”. Wow – this is getting technical!
I also checked a few other sites. One was an article written by Matthew R. Sloat and Gordon H. Reeves on the effects of temperature on rainbow and stealhead trout published by Canadian Science Publishing which is Canada’s largest publisher of international scientific journals.
M. Thibault, P. Blier, and H. Guderly published a journal on rainbow trout metabolism that I found in Semantic Scholar which is a search engine that provides summaries for scholarly papers.
What I found out was that there are a few known “things” that affect the fish’s metabolism. Water temperature, the amount and duration of light, the food supply, and the size of the fish. There may be more.
Interesting!
I didn’t realize the size of the fish had an effect on it’s metabolism. The smaller the fish the higher their metabolism. Meaning the smaller fish will be more active and feed more in the winter than the bigger fish. Jeez – we can attest to that!
My hunch was right on the amount of light. Even though the weather has been very temperate in Pueblo the fish are slowing down due to the shorter days. The bigger fish go into a slumber and congregate near the bottom of the river in slow water. Feeding very little.
To a certain degree the metabolic effects of food supply and the water temperature are minimized on the Tailwater. The water feeding into the Tailwater is released from the bottom of the dam and has a more consistent water temperature year-round. And the warmer weather in the Pueblo area contributes to more species of aquatic insects – the Blue Winged Olive for one - being active in the winter than places with a colder climate.
Jeez – there’s a lot stuff going on here! We potentially have lunar phases, air pressure, weather, metabolism, seasonal turnover in the reservoirs, and who knows what else affecting the fish’s feeding. This is on top of the actual skill of tying and presenting a fly that the fish will eat!
Dorsey also mentions in “Fishing Tailwaters – Tactics and Patterns for Year-round Waters” that for every dozen fish you see in the winter, only a handful will actually be feeding. The key word here is “see”. If we could site fish – that would narrow things down a bit. But so far we haven’t been able to.
So what do you do with all this information? In my humble opinion in the winter you have to keep moving. If you can site fish – that would help a ton. You could target a fish and determine quickly if he is feeding or not. If you can’t, you’re relegated to covering each fishy spot then moving on. Even if you catch a fish in a hole – once you cover it – you need to move on.
That pretty much what we did on this day. We decided to start downriver from the Nature Center – farther downriver than we ever had before. Try new water. One of the guys I chat with often at the local fly shop says he fishes from the Nature Center all the way down to the Pueblo Boulevard bridge – and has good success.
We started at the Gate Hole. It’s on the way to where we were heading and is just too good to pass up. It was about 8:15a and there wasn’t anything hatching to speak of, but we quickly caught a handful of small – 6” to 8” – rainbows each.
A 6" brownie who took the Red Copper John. We caught a bunch of these and the same size rainbows.
We then moved downstream. The river slows considerably as it leaves the Gate Hole. There it’s flat for about 1/8 of a mile or so. Parts of it are waist deep. I found this out crossing the river! Thinking since it’s winter I may as well try fishing the slow water – I gave it a try. It was so slow that it was boring! But I gave it a good college try before moving on.
Brian had moved down before I was finished. I saw him in some faster water and I was getting antsy to join him. I like fishing faster water. As I walked down – I was excited to see a series of weirs that created pools and tailouts. Each one feeding into the next one. If there were fish in this river – they had to be in one of these pools or the tailouts below them.
I named this place The Chutes. The river splits at the top of them forming a small island and each leg has a weir that spans them. The river then joins back up below the island and feeds into another weir which creates yet another pool below it. Each of the pools are pretty deep. My guess is that they range from about 6’ to 8’ deep. Below the tailout from the last weir the river is narrow and pretty fast.
Another view of The Chutes. The small island is middle left and the other leg of the river is on the far side of it.
Brian and I covered every inch of The Chutes with no action. I couldn’t believe that we hadn’t landed some nice fish. We didn’t even have a hit! Are you kidding?
It was getting toward mid-morning and I was on my second – or third – trip through the pools. I was thinking to myself that there had to be fish in the last one. So after covering one more time I made another adjustment to my weight – adding a bit more mud - and low and behold I finally had a fish on!
The bank is short and steep in this area so you can’t wade into the water. And there are a bunch of huge boulders strewn about in the river. So fighting the fish was a bit different and it was a challenge to keep the fish out from under the boulders. But I finally netted him. A 17” rainbow – the 1st nice fish of the day.
I continued to fish that spot thinking that there had to be at least another fish in there – but there wasn’t. At least I couldn’t get any other fish to hit. So I covered the other pools and tailouts again. By this time Brian had moved further downstream. When he returned, he said the water below The Chutes was flat and slow.
That didn’t sound enticing so we decided to eat lunch then head back upstream. Along the way we hit the Gate Hole again. It’s that good! But again we only caught little ones. So we waded out of the river and climbed the bank to the path that parallels the river and walked up to the Diver Hole.
A 17" rainbow I caught in The Chutes on a #22 Flashback Black Beauty.
We had actually left a different times because I wanted to try a spot just upstream from the Gate Hole. As I walked into the Diver Hole, Brian was ahead of me and walking towards the Plunge Holes. I called out to him to let him know I was going to stop and fish the river between the Diver Hole and the Plunge Holes. But he couldn’t hear me.
So I began to fish upstream of the Diver Hole. It was occupied by a guy who we later found out is named Dave. There was also someone in the #2 Plunge Hole and Brian was in the #1 Plunge Hole. We had the river covered!
More of the same experience for me. A lot of little fish. Some of the bigger ones may have been approaching 10” – I didn’t measure them. Brian soon left his spot and I figured he was headed to the Flag Hole. The guy in the #2 Plunge Hole left shortly after. I was planning to move into it, but another guy got there first! So I moved up the #1 Plunge Hole. More small fish!
As soon as the #2 Plunge Hole came open – I moved in. It took a while but I finally had some nice fish on. But they both bolted into the fast water and quickly broke off. I’m not sure if I had them legally hooked – meaning I may have foul hooked them.
There are soft spots in the pool where my indicator was just barely moving – and didn’t look right. So I set the hook. Both times I had a fish on but I couldn’t turn either one of their heads. That’s why I think they may have been foul hooked.
Brian eventually came back to join me. He did go up to the Flag Hole and he too only caught little ones.
Brian was now fishing the river between the Plunge Pools and the Diver Hole and I moved down from the #2 Plunge Pool to the tailout below it.
After a few drifts I had a fish hit – this one was definitely legal – and he began to swim downstream. There were two boulders below me and I couldn’t move any further and for some reason my line was very taunt. Too taunt. I looked up at my rod and realized that my indicator was jammed on my last eyelet on my rod. My line wouldn’t give to the fish and I couldn’t move. Not good. I knew what was going to happen and it did. The fish broke off. He was a nice one – not huge – I’m guessing in the 16” to 17” range. A nice rainbow.
I was pissed. Not so much that the fish broke off – but more so on how. I had noticed when I was gearing up that my leader and tippet was longer than I usually set it – but I didn’t change it. I should have. So I was upset with myself for not doing so. The little things!!
That was pretty much it for the day. We decided to break early – then we had our chat with Dave, the guy who was in the Diver Hole - as we geared down.
It was an off day. The fishing was slow.
It’s winter!
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