After the summer trip to the Taylor, I was dying to return knowing that I had a chance to catch my first double-digit trout. We arrived in the afternoon and found that we had the river pretty much to ourselves. It was cold and it wasn't long before we were fishing in a blizzard. The water was much lower then summer with the flows close to 50 cfs. The fish were still in the “trough”, but there weren’t as many. I think that a lot of the fish were still up close to the dam. We didn’t catch any fish that afternoon, but it was still nice to be out fishing again. That night we returned to the river to find that it was still snowing. We fished for a couple of hours catching only two browns close to 18 inches. Nice fish but not the big ones we were after. The bigger fish didn’t seem to want to cooperate. We returned the next night to similar conditions; Elliot caught a couple of nice fish, a fat 7-pound brown and one slightly smaller. Rob landed his first big rainbow close to 5 pounds and Scott added a 4 pounder. Fishing was a little tougher for me as I was off sight fish for bigger fish. I lost one nice rainbow close to 6 pounds while Elliot was chasing it with the net, but caught lots of 4-5 pound browns.

The next day brought warmer temperatures in the afternoon and we returned with high expectations. It wasn’t long before I spotted a pod of nice fish and had one hooked. It was the smaller one of the group but was still a nice fish close to 6 plus pounds. I returned to the spot and hooked up with another large fish. This was a really long fish, but was probably still close to seven pounds. It is still under debate whether it was larger then Elliott’s fish, but we will end the argument on the next trip when we see who is a better fisherman. Right before it was time to leave I spotted three large rainbows circling the pool, with the largest being 10-12 pounds. I couldn’t entice her to bite so I will have to wait until next time to get my big rainbow.