Arkansas River April 20 2012

Steve, whom I've known for almost 20 yrs since the time I moved to Evanston, flew in from Chicago and we fished the Ark for the Mother's Day Caddis at the Gravel Pits.   The fish were on to sunk green emergent pupae and elk hair dries (tan wings, peacock herl body), though I took two on an emerger in the film.   I think we landed almost a dozen fish fish and had at least that many on.   For some reason, we had a bunch of fish on that threw the hook, including one nice fish Steve had on that took line from his reel.  We started seeing a few caddis at 11:00 and the fish started rising at 2:00.   At the (very) low end of the public lands we found a nice run that had fish rising all around us.  I caught a nice brown after wading across the river to get at a spot behind a boulder.  I saw this fish rise from the bottom almost vertically before he took the EHC.  All the fish were nice 14" plus fish mostly browns.  The bio-diversity in this stream was amazing - I pulled rocks and saw mayflies galore, caddis, stoneflies, etc.  One twig was covered entirely with small caddis larvae.  In addition to the herd of bighorn sheep that came to drink the river water, we also saw a few mule deer bounce across the river.  Great to spend some time with Steve again.

Flows were low (250cfs), water clear, skies clear, temps 60s