It’s now the middle of September here in Calgary, Alberta and it seems as though we are going to start to get some colder weather here. I came home from work today and decided that after supper I was going to head down to the river to try my luck on the Bow River. It’s rained here the past week which has brought the water levels up considerably. The water was still a little dirty from the rain but this is when I like to fish.

The reason for this is quite obvious, the trout see and hear something in the water but because the water is dirty or stained if you will, and they cannot see it clearly; therefore they will hammer your bait more than if the water is clear. This is not always the case but when I seem to have my best luck, especially the big Brown’s; is when the water is a little dirty. So I grabbed a Tim Horton’s coffee and headed down to fish the shore by where I live.

I get there and nobody’s there fishing so I have a big area all to myself which is somewhat rare nowadays. The secret to my success when I fish the shore is to never stay in one spot to long. What I mean by that is if I do not catch a fish within the first ten minutes I move down or up the river into the next spot. This will increase any fisherman’s odds of finding out where the trout are holding in the river.

I break it down in ten yard increments. I’ll fish the first ten yards for ten minutes and if I do not catch anything I’ll move down river and fish the next ten yards of water. I will shoot some video and you can see exactly what I mean by this. Anyway, if the next ten yards are holding trout and I pull one in I’ll stay only for that ten minutes and then I’ll move down again. So, by the time I walk back up to the spot in the river I started fishing at it’s been forty to fifty minutes depending on how long the stretch of shore line you have available.

The secret to my success is fish like variety when it comes to food. Imagine yourself coming home after work and you have the same supper seven days of the week, wouldn’t you get bored of that in a hurry. It’s no different for trout either, so I like to give them a variety of bait to choose from even if I am having good luck with one specific lure. After all variety is the spice of life.

Tonight I started off with the Blue Fox Minnow Spinner, casted it into the first ten yards of water and on the forth cast I had a big fat Brown hit the lure. He missed it but I could see what type of fish he was, and how big he was. I then decided to give that spot a rest even though I just missed a 24-26 inch brown. The chances of him coming back for that again were low.

I proceeded to go further down stream with no luck so it’s time to switch to something else. I came back to the spot I started at and switched to the Berkley Frenzy. It’s now been about twenty minutes since I casted into that spot where I almost caught the big brown. On the very first cast with the Berkley Frenzy I hammered into a 23 inch Rainbow trout that fought extremely hard. He took three leaps out of the water and five minutes to land him. Then I went thirty yards down river and casted into some untouched water. Second cast with the Berkley and a 22 inch Brown completely destroys my lure. Release him and on the very next cast into the same piece of water, an even bigger Brown hammers on the Berkley Frenzy; a 23 inch fatty.