Fall 2014 Urban Trout

I flyfished Lake Petocka in Bondurant last Friday and the first 4 days of this workweek.
Weather conditions varied widely, from 70's to 50's, and wind from glassy calm to 30mph.

Success varied widely as well.  In order of the 5 days fished, trout landed were as follows:  27, 6, 4, 89, 17 (+1 perch).  So, one great day, and a couple of very disappointing days.

I tried a fair number of patterns.  I caught fish on many.  I would say my best-producer was probably a #10 or #8 nymph hook with an orange or dark-colored glass beadhead tied with a sand- or brown-grizzly marabou tail, Canadian olive or Canadian brown simiseal dubbing in a dubbing loop palmered up the hook shank.

Lake Petocka Trout, 5-3-2014

I think I’m pretty much done trying for trout until Fall.   I caught 3 on Saturday morning.  It was a lot of work, but they were pretty nice fish for around here!  I measured one chunky trout at 14.5”, and another was about that length, possibly 15” but a bit slimmer.

The fights were EPIC on the Allen Olympic 12' 5wt switch rod!!!  The 14.5-incher, I was CERTAIN I’d hooked a big brooder!  It dove deep, headed for open water, came up and made a BIG SWIRL, and was fighting strong!  The other nice one rocketed straight across in front of me, the line was SINGING as it sliced through the water…faster than a PIKE!!!  And then it made some some absolutely spectacular speeding porpoise-like jumps out of the water.  It was fantastic!  Its rare to get such awesome fights out of these stocked fish, but it certainly shows what they are capable of. 

I know there are some good trout still in the lake, but "return on investment" recently has been pretty low.  2 of my last 3 trips there resulted in SKUNKS (likely due to the weather conditions), and overall it seems like the comparatively few trout remaining in the lake have moved out away from shore and into deeper water.  I'm not prepared to chase them there yet on fly gear.  Hopefully many of them will survive the summer and be even bigger this coming Fall.  :)  I'm already looking forward to that.

Lake Petocka, evening 4-24-2014

4-24-2014
Lake Petocka
Cloudy, 10 mph wind from NNW
Time fished: 6pm-9pm
Fish sought:  Brooder trout!
Fish caught: 8 Rainbow Trout, 2 Smallmouth Bass

I definitely SAW a lot more fish than I caught.  The action was not fast by any means....it was some work, but fun.  I used my switch rod, which allowed me to reach fish much further away than I would have been able to reach with my regular fly rod.

Plenty of surface activity.  I couldn't buy a fish on topwater, though.

I tried a lot of flies, and only caught fish on two of them....an unweighted black woolly bugger, and a Chili Pepper with a small beadhead.   Maybe I should have tried the Chili Pepper earlier in the evening.  I put in on just before dark, and caught 2 Smallmouth Bass on it about 20' from shore, and 2 trout on some long casts towards the middle of the lake.

Its fairly rare to catch a smallmouth bass in this lake, its rather bizarre that I caught 2 in the same evening.

At one point, I brought one fly right in front of me, watched a trout swim up from underneath, inspect it, refuse it, and swim away.  They CAN be finicky.

One of the last trout I caught was a pretty nice one and really chunky.  It was so dark, I didn't bother measuring or trying to photograph it.

LOVED that sunset last night!

First Open-Water Flyfishing Trip of 2014!!

While en return route from my family's Spring Break trip (a post or two on that will be forthcoming), my friend Dale G. sent me a text that he had fished Lake Petocka earlier that day.  It had some open water (still had a lot of ice on it, though), and that he'd caught 48 trout while flyfishing!

I had planned to check it out once I returned to Iowa, but now I KNEW it was ready for fishing!
I was excited.

So, I headed for Lake Petocka the very next day, fly rod in hand.  Long story short, I didn't do nearly as well as Dale had.   I can only speculate on the reasons.  In the first 3 hours of fishing the NW corner, I had only caught 3 trout.  I headed down along the shore, and picked up another before I ran into the NE corner of the lake.  Here I found a small concentration of fish, and fairly quickly caught 15 more trout, all on beadhead Woolly Buggers.  White ones and gold ones worked best for me this day.

Fished the entire length of the west side and didn't catch any more fish.

Here's some pics:

And next is the first video I've shot with my GoPro camera.  I'm still learning how to use it and edit videos...So hopefully they will get better as time goes on.  Anyway, you can see the ice sheet on the lake in the background.  Hopefully this works!

Lake Petocka Stocker Trout, Fall 2013

I went flyfishing for "stocker trout" at Lake Petocka on Saturday, October 26.  It had been 8 days since they were stocked.
I fished from 9am-3:45pm.  Weather was mostly sunny, high temps reached around 50 degrees F.  Wind was 10-15 mph from the NNW.  I put some hip waders on and waded out to about knee deep.

I used a #8 Beadhead black Woolly Bugger for a good part of the day.  I experimented with a few other colors, caught fish on most of them, but the black seemed to be the trouts' preference on this day.

I ended up catching 67 Rainbow Trout.

I measured one at @ 14.25".  I landed one that I suspect was significantly larger, but it flopped off my fly as I was carrying it back to shore to measure it.  I could have tried to grab it, but I just let it go on its way.
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On Sunday, October 27, I flyfished the lake again in the evening..from 4pm to 6:45pm.  The last hour was fairly worthless.  I ended up with landing 21 Rainbow Trout.  The best fly this time was an unweighted white Woolly Bugger.