Monday Jeff and I made a return trip to Big Four Lake. This time the weather was much nicer and the temperature was a good 30-40 degrees warmer than our trip a month ago. As an added benefit Jeff's dad, Ted, was able to join us.
It was early afternoon when we reached the lake and we were happy to see that we could pretend the lake was our own private water for the afternoon. The fishing started out a bit slow, but with a few fly changes everyone started to catch some nice fish. Ted got on a roll fairly early on landing triploid after triploid on a deer hair grasshopper that he fished wet. After the first several triploids both Jeff and I had to stop fishing and give Ted's fly a close inspection to see what we might have in our boxes to match. I tried a few hopper patterns sunk with no success and finally settled on the tried and true olive woolly bugger trailed by a chironomid or two. This rig did well by me for the rest of the afternoon. Jeff seemed to have caught his fish on a variety of different flies but did quite well with a new pattern called a glass house caddis.
The day was beautiful and catching fish on nymphs would have made for a great day by itself. As the day grew long and there seemed to be a lull in my catching I decided to tie on a couple of dry flies. The timing seemed to be perfect. The fish began feeding consistently enough on the top and I think we caught as many fish in the last or two as we did the rest of the day. I tied on a parachute adams followed by a very small Griffith's gnat. The Griffith's gnat caught the most fish for me, although I could not see it most of the time. This is where the parachute adams worked double duty as a strike indicator. To cap off the day a few white tail deer walked down to the lake ignoring our existence.
