South Platte

VSP

By TB

The South Platte River is a blue ribbon trout stream famous for its most productive sections like Cheesman Canyon, 11 Mile Canyon, Dream Stream and Deckers.  We had the pleasure of fishing the Dream Stream section with Vinnie Renda of the South Platte Fly Shop in Woodland Park, CO.

We met Vinnie at our campground at 7:00am on another COLD October morning.  Lucky for us the campground didn’t have good cell service because a message from Vinnie came through from days earlier asking us if we could meet at 6:00am.  What we soon realized, as we arrived at the river just below Spinney Mountain Reservoir, was that it wasn’t because of good fishing early, but because so many anglers wanted to get the “prime” spots first!   When we arrived, there were already at least 10 cars in the parking lot.  However, we found there was plenty of water to be found.

As we fished different spots along the Dream Stream section, the winds kept howling with increasing intensity.  30-40mph gusts were common with a constant 20mph wind.  This didn’t deter us at all as we chucked our nymph rigs into likely spots and watched for the slightest movement in our strike indicators.  When it happened, BOOM… the water would explode as large brown trout would fight to expel the tiny #18 zebra midge fly that fooled them.

We really enjoyed our day fishing with Vinnie and appreciated his desire to keep people off the “redds”.   Vinnie explains this and more in his “Guide Talk” as we conducted it inside the SaraLinda due to the gale force winds outside.  Enjoy!