Hey guys...had an interesting learning experience yesterday. Its winter and all the "experts" out here are saying look for the slow deep holes...Ive been doing that for a few weeks with ok success...nothing great.
Having spent hours passing by some tasty looking water for the past few weeks I decided to fish the tasty spots...some riffly water, some pockets etc. Well I'm 3 casts into a pocket and "bam" my indicator jumps about a foot. Nice 18" bow to the net in about 5 mins or less. He fought hard! Next cast was to a rock in a big flat...didnt see any harm in trying. When my fly hit the water saw two shadows scream upstream...so I went up the hill to see what I could see and spotted about 10 good sized fish in various nooks and crannies in the flat.
Hmmmm....tried for a couple of those but really wasnt geared up for doing that type of fishing so I put that in the "memory bank" and moved on...all in all covered 3.5 miles yesterday fishing all the spots I would normally fish in spring summer and fall. Took several out of the good looking pocket waters and riffles...all strong bows and browns...no dinks. fish were hitting my red #12 copper john(my anchor fly) and not touching the smaller flies I had dropped off the back. Very much not in sync with what Ive been hearing about winter fishing on the Platte. Conditions were great...h2o was 36-39 degrees...air temps were 11-45 deg...my line was freezing in the AM...no wind to speak of. Sunny with a few clouds...having not done that much winter fishing is this an anomaly and the fish are expected to hunker back down or is this somewhat typical in a tailwater such as the South Platte. Any opinions.