Rocky Mountains Trip -- Rene

[Rene Zillmann]

Hi friends,

Sorry for the short notice from yesterday. I was still traveling,
thought you deserve at least a short note that I'm fine.

We returned home in the meantime, and I can say we had a great time and
it was an extraordinary experience. It was a family trip, and we did
hope to do some nice fishing - so, let me focus on fishing.

Thanks to Nev we had no issues to obtain the B.C. license. We (my wife
and me) did fly into Vancouver, grabbed a RV and finally joint our son
and his family in Clearwater. From there we drove into the Wells Gray
Park, and did stay 3 days at the Wells Gray Golf Resort and RV Park. For
those of you, who like golf and fly-fishing - a spot to consider. Pam is
a friendly and helpful host, the park is nicely kept - and Clearwater as
a town to buy food just an hour away. I cannot comment on the quality of
the golf course. No mobile phone network there, but that might be a good
message for some of us.

For flyfishing: the Clearwater river is running through the camp side,
is loaded with trout and is easy to access. The first 2 days we did wade
and fish downstream. The bottom of the river is covered with smaller and
mid-sized gravel and easy to wade. Caught a huge number (stopped
counting after 20) smaller and mid-sized (12 inches) trout. Each spot,
which might keep fish, had fish. We did catch all on dries, good flies
have been Madam-X as hopper pattern, Klinkhammer (lots of mosquito
around and biting), bivisible and EHCs. Released the fish.

On the 3rd day we did fish upstream (had to move our RVs to a new side),
different characteristic of the river. Huge blocks of stones, huge trees
in the water, a bit tricky to wade and to stay dry. The fish were a bit
larger, and good to catch. Same pattern. I switched later to stone-fly
nymphs, as I encountered some larger fish in pockets, close to the trees
and further logs in the water. I did catch one of the larger ones, but
still in the mid-size group. I had to stop fishing earlier in the
evening. I'm sure that it is possible to find and catch larger ones in
this area.

I continue with the report tomorrow, however - to be honest -,, hm... we
did not catch any fish on the next spots.

Best wishes

Rene