We’ve been nymphing and throwing streamers most of this year and really didn’t expect anything different when we made it to South Fork, CO and the Rio Grande River. We met our guide, Aaron Horrocks, at Wolf Creek Anglers, talked about which section of the river we’d be floating and headed out.
As usual, the guide gets the boat ready, backs it down into the water, drives their truck/trailer up to await the shuttle, and comes back down and we all get in. The next step is to rig up our fly rods. As Aaron started this process, he said “double dries” today. We were both VERY pleasantly surprised by this, but were still a bit skeptical given other guides had talked about fishing dries during our floats but it never panned out. However, that skepticism disappeared in about 5 minutes when we hooked up with our first fish of the day; it hit a small, black caddis and the fishing was on.
Throughout the day we fished caddis, stimulators (a bit of everything fly), drakes, yellow sallies, stoneflies, mayflies and a few I’d never seen before. When one “hatch” stopped, another was already starting. We lost track of the number of fish we caught because we were all laughing and having so much fun watching these amazing trout come up and sip or devour our dry flies. It was truly a “Dry Fly Daze” we were in and it was awesome!
We took time out for lunch to interview Aaron in his boat on the Rio Grande. We found out that Aaron was a middle school math teacher, but had taken a job as Assistant Principal of the K-8 school in the area. Furthermore, we found out his school was going 1-1 iPads this fall. While we shared a few Apple stories and jokes, we still kept our focus on fishing and fun, as you will see in Aaron’s “Guide Talk” on the Rio Grande.