Green River Fontenelle 5-2 Through 5-3-2013

Date / Time: 5-2 evening around 7-8:30pm, 5-3 9am to 7 float. Location: 5-2 reservoir near spillway for an hour, then above weeping rock on river. 5-3 float from six mile hill to OCI bridge. The Characters: Kory first eve, then BK and Dave Wetzel joined. Weather: Calm and mostly sunny with high clouds. Pleasant with highs in upper 50s and cold overnight in 20s. Water Temp: low 40s guess Water Level: Low around 820 Water Clarity/Quality: clear. Moon Phase: Last quarter. Fishing: 5-2-1013: Headed up Thursday evening and got to reservoir around 7:30 to just look. Took a look off dam overlook and tons of fish cruising so headed down. Thought it would be on, but again like two weeks previous fish were very spawn focused. Eventually got two on a small lead eye mohair in olive or black. Threw the egg at the end and one strike, but that was it didn’t fish it too hard. Headed down to river and figured I would throw streamer for a bit through the drop and slow water above Weeping. Had a heavy sink tip rigged but fished it with a black beadhead rabbit leech and ended up hooking 3 fish landed one 17 inch brown. A few random risers were around but not enough to target. 5-3-2013: Brian and Dave drove up and met me after I camped solo. We were floating down low so I scouted around for takeouts. I had looked at Google map night before and 6 mile hill to Big Island had tons of braids and looked good. We ended up floating from 6 mile all the way to OCI bridge, long but doable and we had a trolling motor. Thought we would hit a fish or two and hopefully a giant, and started throwing streamers for nada. Stopped on the first drop and nymphed. I had the olive leech as a lead with a beadhead and egg behind and decided to leave it so I didn’t have to use weight. Ended up hooking several on the leech, BK hooked a few on the worm, already better than we thought. We moved to next spot and it was even better, I put on the worm instead of the big midge bead after a bit since they weren’t eating the midge. Most fish ate the worm and egg and we ended up hammering tons of fish including some big rainbows, battlers. Mostly rainbows oddly and bright, killer looking lake fish. Every obvious riffly spot below spawning looking gravel shallow riffles was like this. We hammered them and the fish were ripping hot. We got a few in the low 20s with BK getting the big Rainbow of the day and me getting the big brown both around 22ish. It was a stellar day and I will definitely head back to that lower river.