Antero Saved The Day

[Mike Cline]

My cousin Matt and I spent three days last week in Salida, Colorado for the express purpose of floating and fishing the Arkansas River.  Although we got in a few hours on the Ark Wednesday evening, thunderstorms blew out the river and our floats were canceled.  Our misfortune however turned into good fortune as we now got the opportunity to fish Antero Reservoir in the upper South Platte system.  Our guides from ArkAnglers (Salida):  Larry Friedrichs (Thursday) and Dan Howard (Friday) did a great job on getting us on fish.

Antero, for those who don’t know it, is a 2500 acre reservoir at the headwaters of the South Platte river near Fairplay, Colorado.  Built in 1909 and now owned by the Denver Water Recreation Manager – Colorado Division of Wildlife is almost 9000ft MSL and Antero has always been a productive fishery.  It is a relatively shallow reservoir—average depth 10-12 feet, but just loaded with aquatic vegetation and food for trout.  In 2002 during the drought, Antero was losing water to evaporation faster than inflows.  The authorities decided to save the remaining water and drained the lake.  Over 10,000 trout were salvaged into Spinney and Eleven mile reservoirs downstream.  Antero was closed to fishing until July 17th of this year.

Restocking began at ice out in 2006 with 3-5” fingerlings of Rainbows, Cutt Bows, Browns, Cutthroats, Brook Trout and Splake.  Antero had reputation of trout that grew 10 inches plus a year.  That reputation was conservative as on opening day, the Rainbows were averaging 18-20 inches with lots of larger fish.  I guess Opening day and the following few days were a bit of a zoo, but by early last week, the crowds had left and Antero didn’t seem crowded at all.

Although Antero has no tackle restrictions, we were there to fly fish for trout.  The technique that worked the best was suspending nymphs under an indicator.  We hung tandems of size 14-18 Hare’s ear, Pheasant Tail, Soft Hackle and Damsel nymphs at about 8 feet.  I must admit it was a bit like Bobber fishing for bream, but the resemblance ended there.  Strikes were sometimes subtle and sometimes violent.  The big difference however, was the size of the fish and fight.  Once hooked, every trout we caught was a challenge to land on the 4X tippets and 5wgts we were using.  They took a lot of line and the rainbows spent half the fight airborne.  They were tough to keep on the hook.  Over the course of the two days, we landed about two dozen fish and failed to land just as many during the fight.  Although I never broke one off, I had at least three straighten out a size 16 soft hackle nymph.  We caught Browns, Rainbows, Cut Bows and a beautiful Snake River Cutthroat—all at or above 18”.  Some of rainbows lost during the fight were definitely larger.

It was a great experience for both Matt and I, not so much from a technique standpoint—Bobber fishing, but in that we knew every fish we hooked was going to challenge our fish fighting skills.  Skills that got better on every fish.

So, our misfortune of not being able to float the Arkansas put us on some pretty nice Antero trout.

[adam long]

those are some nice fish. I’ve been reading tons of good reports from there in the last couple of weeks

[Author]

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