When I’m floating I use a # 3 or a # 4 because this size of spinner has enough weight to make it spin properly when bottom bouncing. When I fish from shore I’ll use a little bigger spinner as I can cast further out into the river. Probably my favorite color pattern is the Gold Shiner with either the skirt or without it. With this spinner, I tend to buy them with the skirt as I have had more success with skirted models. The next pattern I most commonly use is what they refer to as the Brown Trout spinner. This spinner works awesome for large Brownies on the Bow River. Another one of my favorites is the Perch pattern and works great for Rainbow’s or Brown’s. And finally, the Hot Pepper pattern in the Blue Fox spinner series is also a very good spinner to keep in your tackle box.

Next I would like to talk about the Blue Fox Vibrax Minnow Spinners or what I like to call my all-time Brown Trout lure. These lures cannot be beaten when it comes to fishing for HUGE trout on the Bow River. Tom. B and I were out on the Bow one mid-summer evening in 2004. Fishing within the city limits of Calgary under the Bridge, were both chucking Minnow Spinners and the next thing you know Tom’s rod is bent over with the tip almost touching the river. He battles this monster for around five minutes and finally gets this thing to shore and I’m like, oh my good lord that’s the biggest Brown I’ve ever seen.

Some people were walking their dog that evening and said exactly what I was thinking. So out comes the measuring tape from my back pack while Tom’s unhooking the monster, the people walking their dog take a photograph and I measure the Brownie; 30 inches and what a beautiful fish. We pause for a moment to take in what had just transpired and back at it we went. The color he was using that day was hot orange or as Blue Fox calls it, Gold Fluorescent Red. These lures will catch you MASSIVE Brown and Rainbow trout on a consistent basis, and once you start catching fish with these lures, you will never and I mean never, not have these in your tackle box! In addition to the hot orange minnow spinner, the most common minnow spinner I like to use is the Brown trout pattern in the 7/ 16 weights or size 9.

I cannot believe how many massive Browns I have caught over the years on this particular color combination. This lure looks like a sucker minnow which are an abundant food source in the Bow River and big Browns seem to annihilate these large minnow imitations. This lure is a body of a minnow with a spinner blade attached to the front of the face of the minnow, which is sonic. The action of the bait combined with the sonic spinner blade makes this my absolute favorite fishing lure on the market today. And these lures also work very well on aggressive Rainbow trout and Bull Trout. Wherever trout live this lure will catch you the fish you’ve been dreaming of. Another good color that works well is called shiner, which is black on top with a really shiny silver bottom and works awesome for Rainbow Trout and most all other types of trout. If I ever get a chance to go Steelhead fishing this lure would be the first to go on my line just to see how effective they are on this sea run Rainbow trout. Maybe one day.

Have you ever been into your local tackle shop and started looking around for the next best fishing lure on the market, I know I have and sometimes you leave frustrated and dejected. This is the main reason why I am writing this article, to try and eliminate some of these frustrations while shopping at your local tackle shop. Tom Brodie and I have spent countless hours fishing all over Alberta and have pretty much narrowed down what works for Rainbow and Brown trout on the World renowned Bow River. We are by no means fly fisherman, so all information in this article pertains to spin cast fishing.