Samantha bought her husband a gift certificate as a surprise for his birthday today so instead of spending the day at the hospital as he thought he was going to, he spent the day on the water with us learning to fish. We took Greg and his brother Chad from Glenmore to Police as they live in the city and wanted to learn the water close to their house, and Chad needed to be in cell phone range in case he got the call as he and his wife are expecting a baby (nice!)
The forecast had called for more rain but the weather was smoking hot without a cloud in the sky which is not exactly the best news for this river. Overcast is ideal for the bow, and under normal circumstances sunshine is fine but its the quick transitions that can put the fish off. Fish in the bow are so well fed that they can be fickle when it comes to short term changes despite adjusting to long term and dramatic changes better then any fish in any body of water I know.
Both Greg and Chad picked up fly fishing very quickly, the only problem was the fishing were not reinforcing their performance. Greg took a nice brown before we got to the Deerfoot bridge so finally the skunk was off (now we were in stealth mode and they couldn't smell us coming ;) As it turns out the skunk smell had not been as important a factor as the hot weather as the fishing remained very tough for the duration of the day. We switched over to streamers as the fish were not feeding so we tried to get at least a territorial or aggressive response out of the fish and Greg hooked up another 20" fish, this time a rainbow right away in fish creek park but that was it again for landed fish.
From a guiding standpoint this is one of the toughest days I've had this year as the boys caught on to the casting very well but we weren't catching fish which always leads newcomers to second guess themselves when the blame lay on the weather and the fish today, not the fisherman.
