coastal trout event 2011

my first stillwater cutthroat on my micro sparkle leech

dry fly cutthroat upper 30's weather middle of november oh yeah

nathan's dry fly cuttie

nathan's landlocked coho

the reservoir

brad arrived late and caught this coho on his spinning gear

Yesterday  was the first annual oregon fishing forum  trout event  in the coast range,  quite a few people dropped out at the last second leaving a very small group of anglers but it was still a great time with alot of suprises. We arrived quite early so we had time to fish (gate opens at 7am closes 4pm) we arrived around 8am i believe,  started to unpack and chat a little then finally got on the water,  there was frost on alot of the downed timber in the area and you could see snow on the hills surrounding us, i figured the fish would be lethargic and less active today  so i threw on a thingamabobber , set it at 6 ft and  tied on a micro sparkle leech in size 14  to search for the fish.  after a few minutes casting around nobody had yet  caught a fish until out of the corner of my eye, the bobber went down i set the hook and stripped line  to keep pressure on the fish then netted it, this was my first stillwater  cutthroat so we got a pic then released it. After that things only got better as the clouds cleared and it started to warm,  i had missed several bites   and could not seem to get a hookup. my friend nathan managed a fish while i struggled, he caught a landlocked coho on a black zebra midge and further down the lake chris caught a coho on his spinning gear.  i had missed even more bites then drew landed a nice landlocked coho on his custom black bugger,  then the bite seemed to die for a short amount of time then a hatch occured as drew left further down lake and decided to bank fish...   small black looking stoneflies..  i did not know what they were.. they just looked like stoneflies based on length of the body, the way the wings lay back etc. But the fish were eating them ,small black midges,brown midges and some water spiders..a smorgasboard of bugs for the fish.There were so many fish rising it was unbelieveable. We threw on dries like the griffith's gnat but no success, then nathan threw on a small dry, (ive never saw what it was ) then i decided to go just under the surface with a royal soft hackle i came up with.  we both casted and i hooked one that snapped me off and nathan caught a nice cutthroat on a dry!!  that got us really excited. It was at  that moment i remembered what i heard about dry fly fishing a lake on a brian chan internet radio thing, very shrot trips of line slowly to make a v wake like a bug skittering.  I tied on a size 16 BWO cripple  and casted, fished it for a mintue then a fish decided to smash thefly hard. I set the hook and managed to hook this one and get a picture. we continued to cast dries for another 10 minutes, i landed another one and hooked a fat fish (approx 16-18 inches)  and a smaller one on the same cast!  after a while the hatch died, the weather cooled off and the fish activity was gone. We decided to pack up and call it a day and head out.