Fishing Report - from Fish Tales Fly Shop July 2 & 3

Photo courtesy, Jeff at Fish Tales Fly Shop

River report – July 3

The Bow at Calgary is now running at about 325 m3/s.

Conditions are slowly improving although the river is still higher than normal. Visibility is 8-10″ along the shore and the color has a slight greenish hue to it.

We’ve received a few reports from wade anglers who are having some good success nymphing.

Monday’s group of 9 float anglers – all experienced on the Bow River and mostly guides who work with Fish Tales – worked hard and had some success nymphing with san juan worms, peacock leeches, and stonefly nymphs. We’d asked them to go check out the conditions to determine fishability for upcoming trips particularily over the next few days. Based on what they experienced we cancelled trips Tuesday/Wednesday but plan to go Thursday.

A few of them headed back out for an early morning excursion this a.m. which will help determine the plan for the rest of this week. Once the Bow drops another 10 – 15% to somewhere around 270 or 280 m3/s we’ll be “happier.”

Jeff took An exploratory trip to the mountains over the long weekend. Here’s what he saw:

“Our local mountain streams have come a long way from opening weekend but everything is still running high. Typically the higher you go the better it gets with Cataract looking the cleanest out of them all. Livingstone not far behind, while curiously Racehorse and Dutch looked the worst and still need some time to adjust with only a foot of visibility. Close to the city, the Highwood and Sheep rivers are still churning winter’s waste away, while near the headwaters it cleans up a little and there were some taking advantage of that. Just like on the Bow, fish are holding in the slack water but flows make it un-crossable and therefore some tougher fishing. We opted to fish the Oldman in the gap for bulls and though this had maybe (big maybe) a foot of vis we did find some fish. There were a few bugs around but no major hatches to write home about. With the long range forecast looking good into next weekend this should return these streams to their normal selves.”

Fish Tales Fly Shop - Fishing Reports