I arrived in Bridgeport, CA around 6:30PM from West Yellowstone, MT on Tuesday September 26 and checked into my usual haunt, the Walker River Lodge…
Walker River Lodge in Bridgeport, CA…
After unpacking, I walked over to the Bridgeport Inn for a bite to eat and the best Virgin Bloody Mary in the Eastern Sierras…
On Wednesday morning, September 26th., I drove up to visit with my friend Carolyn Webb, who, along with her husband John, operates the Virginia Lakes Resort…
It had snowed up there while I was in Montana and some remnants remained in the parking lot…Carolyn fixed me a great bacon breakfast and I reviewed a lot of the photos Michael and I had taken on our Montana trip with her…
As I made my way back down the mountain, I stopped to take some photos of the foliage that was just beginning to change with the colder weather…
This is a view looking East towards Nevada…
After a stop at the Walker River Lodge to get wadered-up, I headed on down to the meadow section of the East Walker River to finally fly fish in some warmer temps and wear a T-Shirt… the couple that had parked next to me were kind enough to take this photo … 🙂
This is the meadow section of the East Walker River just below Bridgeport Reservoir…
Because of the drought here in California, the East Walker River has not sustained any heavy fishing pressure in the last five years. Subsequently, there has been an explosion of stream side vegetation growth over that period of time…which is great. The problem is the effect that the drought has had on the quality of fishing on this river. To put it mildly, it has suffered…particularly in it’s once legendary population of large Brown Trout…
There was once a small island in the middle of this run that disappeared after 1988 when the reservoir and river were de-watered. The die-off of Trout and other creatures in the biomass, affected the quality of fishing on the river for the following twelve years or so…the island disappeared after the silting was removed from the river in this stretch… Here & Here
Back in the 1970’s, this meadow was like a giant sponge. Walking on it, a swishing sound could be heard…
The water was a bit off color, but the heavy flows through the Spring and Summer removed the weeds and moss that made fishing in here a disaster the previous year (2016)…
This is a few hundred years upstream and closer to the dam…I caught two Trout this afternoon, both were small Rainbows on Midge patterns. The couple that parked next to me got nada…
On Thursday morning, I decided to try the water closer to the dam and parked here. I was the first vehicle in that spot at about 8AM…
I used some caddis patterns from this box first…
…and decided to give the Winston BIIIX Super 10, 5wt. a work out…
I played around in here for awhile…Supposedly, the flows were running at 195cfs.
Uni no…watching this blow out of the pipe at the toilet bowl and checking the gauge confirmed something was way off…
So I moved down river to one of my favorite spots….
Tied one of these on as a dropper…
This pattern…
Over the next couple of days, I worked this general area over from bank to bank, using Midges for the most part. This anchor pattern produced a couple of nice fish too…
I also hooked a couple of larger Trout that I LDR’d and never saw once they got below me here…
Strangely, for the first time, I dredged a number of these guys off the bottom fishing in a couple of different sections. Time to tie some of these up in a couple of sizes for use next year. These were about 6″ long…
Snagged a couple in here…
I also used a lot of various deer hair wing Serendipities that proved productive…
I really didn’t need to trip over a concealed fire ring in the underbrush and fall flat on my face…
The colors in the fading sunlight were spectacular…
Ate a bunch of great meals…
In some great places…Virginia Creek Settlement…
Fast food Gourmet…The Jolly Kone…
Got to see a great sunset from the porch at the Bridgeport Inn…
A few memories with these guys…I had a discussion with the guys at Ken’s Sporting Goods in Bridgeport about the ratio of Rainbows to Browns that I was eating ing the MM section of the East Walker River. They were of the opinion that a good number of Rainbow Trout were blown out of Bridgeport Reservoir during the heavy releases during the Spring and Summer. I would have to agree …some of those fish were really grotesque and distorted…
…and back down the grade into Bishop towards LA…
NEXT: … back to tying…
PT/TB
PLANETTROUT: Fly Fishing, Fly Tying and LIFE
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