My friend Tim Rajeff, host of LL Bean's Guide to the Outdoors finally made it to Calgary this summer to do some fishing and filming with us. Given the fluctuating water levels on the bow we decided to head to the mountains to chase cutties, cutbows, and bull trout. With camera gear in tow we made the hike down into the canyon and were quickly rewarded when the first cutty took the beetle pattern I was fishing. It was pretty nice to be fishing for a change instead of simply guiding. Surprisingly, working our way up the canyon we saw next to no rising fish, but we did have cutties still coming up for our bugs but even the 18" cutty Tim got was pretty snakey.
We headed up out of the canyon to fish the water closer to the truck now that most people had left the area. Right away we found big cutties feeding, and aggressively at that. These big fish were all over our Green Drakes but I had dropped the ball on this one as our timing was off by about an hour. We had finally found a few rising fish down in the canyon that we kept casting to, but we should've headed up above sooner as these were much bigger fish and they were feeding far more aggressively. We took a couple really nice 18-20" fish but then ran out of light to keep filming so day 1 had come to an end.
