All I want for my birthday is a BIG FAT trout
I awoke on Friday morning wondering what to do for my birthday. I had the day off of work and had and had some errands to run in the morning. By the time ten rolled around, I was done running around Calgary. I stopped in to get my tire fixed and while I waited, I walked over to the shop Todd works at for a surprise visit. He was busy fixing his sweethearts car and never knew it was my birthday. When you get old like me you tend not to tell too many people. I asked Todd if he had time to go slay down some trout. He responded promptly, “well ya talked me into it”. It was like asking a kid if he wanted to go to the candy store for some treats. I wanted to treat myself to a nice present, what can I say. A few rainbows all wrapped in slime is the best present any die hard fisherman like me really wants!
We arranged to meet at Policeman’s Flats where we were to launch the boat and fish down river from there. For those of you who don’t know where Policeman’s Flats is, you take Deerfoot Trail to Dunbow Road and head east on Dunbow Road. You then turn left onto Bow River Bottom Trail and head down the hill to the Policeman’s Flats parking lot. Back in 2005 when the Bow River flooded out, Policeman’s Flats boat launch and parking lot was totally destroyed and needed major reconstruction work to rebuild both the parking lot and the boat launch. The Policeman’s Flats rehabilitation project was required to be completed by Alberta Sustainable Resource Management (Formerly Alberta Fish & Wildlife) due to the Floods, which caused massive damage to the existing wetlands. The objective was to recreate an atmosphere by using as many recycled materials, and to construct with minimal impact to the surrounding wetlands. This project took over a year to complete and required a major face lift to the old launch. By 2006 it was finished and ready for use to the relief of many local guides and fishermen.
The weather was cloudy and a little chilly, perfect trout fishing conditions for the Bow River. The water was clean and looking ideal for catching and not just casting. We loaded the equipment into the Zodiac and headed off down river for some fish. I have been searching for new lures to add to the weapons cache and elected one in particular to test out for a few hours. A shallow diving jerkbait I have been chomping at the bit to try out! This particular lure dives 2-4 feet deep which is just the thing for the shallow water conditions we have now on the Bow. You can use this lure a few ways!
One way is to cast out and retrieve steady and then give it a rip or two, this makes the lure slash as you add the rip to the lure. Once you get the trout’s interest, I like to make a few more revolutions and then completely stop the lure for one or two seconds. The lure will still move a little with the current of the river and act as a wounded bait fish. This technique will catch fish for sure! The more realistic you can make your minnow look to your quarry, the better success you will have. Another way I like to fish the jerkbait is to continuously jerk the lure like this, reel-reel-reel, jerk-jerk-jerk and then keep reeling five or six times then repeat all the way into the boat or shoreline. I will play with all speeds of retrieve as well as how many quick jerks I put on the lure until I get fish to strike.
Both Todd and I were using this jerkbait Friday, Todd had the brown color going and I had a rainbow looking color. Both really superior colors to use at this time of the year! Just twenty minutes into our mission Todd latches into a whale of a rainbow. He battles this beast and gets the fish to the boat but was not able to net it. That’s really too bad because this fish was huge and would have made a great feature picture for the Blog post. Stuff happens and we continued to chuck these jerk baits all day long with excellent results.
We were casting into ideal trout territory with these lures. If you look in the picture I have added into this post you will notice two channels of the river meeting. In the seam that is created is where we concentrate on. You can see the seam between the blue line and the black line I drew in the picture. We cast over the seam and twitch our lures through, normally catching trout on the deep water side. The trickle of water where I have labeled shallow water is where the trout were hanging waiting for food to come over the ledge and into the deeper water. It is important to point out to you that sometimes the fish are sitting in the deep water below the drop in depth and sometimes they are actually in the shallow water. I choose to cast into the shallow water and let the current take the lure over the ledge, and then I will make the lure move after it trickles over. We caught many fish using this technique all day long! This is what I call the Bow River hot spots. Fishing these locations caught us a plethora of trout that chilly Friday fall afternoon.
What more could a guy ask for on his birthday. Possibly a gift certificate for some more lures or a new spinning reel! That would be nice but I sure did enjoy boxing with some heavy weight trout! That makes me wish everyday was my birthday.
