East Walker River, CA - End of Oct 2017

 with oEast Walker River, CA - End of Oct 2017

Cfs ~130; low 70's
Euro Nymphing/Indicator Nymphing
Nymphs used: Chartrues  Mop Fly, Hare & Copper, Rubber Legs

Caught a few 12-14" browns below the bridge/miracle mile but did not film it. Made my way from there upstream and fished the miracle mile to the bowl below Bridgeport Reservoir. Great day of fishing. Lots of hard fighting rainbows with only one brown caught in the miracle mile. The rainbows must have pushed most of the browns below the bridge?

Started out euro nymphing with a 15' leader, but the strong wind was making that method difficult to fish. So I tried out a new indicator setup with my euro nymphing rig. Worked extremely well. I just put on the indicator at the end of my sighter, then put a size 1 split shot above the knot where the two flies are connected in a Euro rig.

The 10' 3wt Sage Pulse is an incredible nymphing rod! Handled larger fish no problem and felt like I can tackle much larger fish. Nice balance between sensitivity for euro nymphing, and some backbone to fish the larger western rivers.

All the fish I caught were looking very healthy and fat. Biggest fish was about 16". He flopped out of the net so I couldn't get a good shot of him for the video. Spooked a giant fish of 6-8lbs. when crossing some frog water. Might have been a carp. If not it was a monster brown!

What a great day of fall fishing. Temperature was perfect, but the wind was somewhat annoying for euro nymphing and I ended up switching to indicator nymphing. The crowds were much less than I expected, and only ran into a lot of people when I got close to the area right below the dam/bowl. Never fished this area above the bridge, or what is called the miracle mile, as whenever I have driven by it in the past it has been a zoo with people everywhere. The biggest fish are supposedly here however.

Came across a couple of dead Sacramento Perch. Not sure if they washed over the dam and died, or some large fish tried and failed to eat them.

I will do a post/video later after some more testing about the indicator setup I stumbled across when using the euro nymph rig. Not sure if it was a fluke and the fish were just heavily feeding, or that it provided some great natural drifts. It was nice to be able to switch back and forth and indicator nymph the long runs. I generally like to indicator nymph when exploring new water and want to cover a lot of ground.

Finally made it to the bowl as that was my goal for the day. It was surprising how long it took to get there from the bridge where I parked. The river really meanders through here. I got there just in time before it got too dark and didn't get to fish much of the area directly below the bowl, nor the bowl itself. I can imagine there are some very wise and big fish lurking about in the 1/4 mile or so below the bowl. The water gets flogged by fishermen almost year round in this spot.

When the sun dipped behind the mountains the temperature plummeted and I could see my breath, so I decided to call it a day. The deep freeze of winter is about to hit the Bridgeport area and the river sometimes will get covered with ice. This was my last trip to the East Walker for the season--looking forward to next April to fish it again! Glad to see it has recovered nicely from the drought and will continue to get better the next few years.