Black Fishday at Rocky Ford Creek

With the turkey, stuffing, and pie put away (and I don't mean in the fridge!), the relationships with family members who live distant rekindled, and the Thursday night football game finished (go Hawks!), there was only one thing left to complete the Thanksgiving weekend - Black Fishday. While others crowd the mall, Tom and Rick headed to Rocky Ford Creek, the only viable option for moving water with all the rivers swollen from recent rains. The day after Thanksgiving, this place is often more crowded than the mall, but we arrived early and were pleasantly surprised to find only one other car in the parking lots. That was a good start - now if the fish would cooperate. And cooperate they did.

 

Starting at the corner above the bridge, we had a few chasers stripping, Tom with a black woolly bugger, Rick with a small olive leach. A couple to hand, but no fast and furious action. Moved to check out the skinny water. No action on small flies. A change back to stripping brought a few more fish.

 

Nice fish from the skinny water

Another view of the same fish

Coming back up we stopped at the rocky peninsula where the stream narrows and it got a little silly. Lots of fish, with dead drifting or slow stripping working better than fast stripping. Tom broke off his bugger, tied on another with a dull hook, and proceed to farm out (lose) about ten fish in a row, which is abnormal, even for him (five or six is believable, but ten?). Finally digging into his pack to pull out another bugger, he was able to land a few.

 

Tom finally lands one after changing from his dull hook

Things finally slowed there, so we moved back up, stopping below the bridge. Bugger and leach, dead drifted or slow stripped continued to catch good numbers of fish. With the sun rising in the sky, action slowed somewhat as we worked our way up towards the middle skinny water, usually catching at least one or two at every opening in the reeds where we stopped. Approaching the middle skinny, the Black Friday crowds began to catch up with us, and there were fishermen lining both sides of the bank, so we turned around, made a few more casts on the way back, found a few more fish, then headed for home, another successful Black Friday outing. It was a little different from our normal sleet/snow/freezing rain (sunny and 60°F), but the fish didn't seem to mind and neither did we.

 

Nice fish with colors brought out by the sun