Category: 2021, September San Juan River and SpaceX

Tomorrow I’ll drive to Bottomless Lakes State Park just outside of Roswell, New Mexico. I’ll drive right by Georgia O’keeffe’s home in Abiquiú, New Mexico. It’s a museum. Even before COVID a reservation was necessary to take a tour. When planning this trip on short notice I tried to make a reservation but it is booked about 2 months out. Today I’m just going to straighten things out and clean up for the rest of the trip. This is a dusty area.

A frustrating day of fishing. The first hour and a half of fishing was pretty dead. The trout were inactive but then they started feeding from the surface, something I had not seen in the past. They have always been feeding just below the surface on emergers. It might look like they are rising but what you are typically looking at are their tails or the tops of their backs. I watched many open mouths taking something from the surface. I learned my lesson today. I have been trying to only carry items in my vest I know I will use. Stupid, the stuff doesn’t weigh much at all. I didn’t have dry flies or terrestrials. I was using a piece of white wool for a strike indicator. Two times I watched a large trout come up and grab my indicator and hold it long enough for me to feel his weight. Today while walking to the river I saw more grasshoppers than I had ever seen here. Damn! It was only 2:30 so I hiked back to my truck, drove back to my trailer, rigged for hoppers and dries, drove back to the river, and hiked back to my spot. The trout were back to feeding subsurface! Almost funny. I tried hoppers, ants, beetles, and super small black dry flies for a while without any action. I had no chance of seeing the super small black dry flies. I went back to the typical San Juan rig again with no luck. Oh well. It was a beautiful day.

When fishing in the “Quality Waters” you only see serious fly fisher people, no kids, no families. My campground is just below the “Quality Waters” so there aren’t any special regulations. Families walk by heading to the river, dad and maybe mom carrying open face spinning outfits and the kids carrying the good old Zebco closed faced spinning reel outfits. They look like they are on a mission, anxious to get a bite on a worm. Looks like fun to me.

There were two older guys across and upstream from me maybe 50 yards . I heard a little commotion, looked, and one guy had gone swimming. He was all the way in and then was sitting on the river bottom with the water over his waders. That water is cold! He went to shore, came back, and toughed it out for a while but soon started walking towards the road.

Super windy all day. A good day to read. Tuesday and Wednesday look to be perfect, mid 70s during the day with very little wind. They will be my last two days of fishing this year.

Sunday I caught fish. Today the guy behind the counter of one of the two fly shops in Navajo Dam told me they increased the water flow into the river yesterday which improved the fishing. I guess it wasn’t me.

Last night I learned that my furnace isn’t sophisticated enough to know when it runs out of propane. It thought it was an air conditioner.

Since I’ve been here the daytime temperatures have been a constant 88 to 92 with the nighttime temperature getting down to 50. Yesterday not long before dark a front came through and it actually rained a little bit. Today it’s in the mid 70s. Tonight it’s supposed to get down to 39. The elevation here is around 5700 feet. Usually there are very few clouds. It gets damn hot fast in that sun. Spoke too soon on the temperature. It’s back in the mid 80s.

Fished for a few hours today. On my hike into the river I overheard a couple of guys saying how terrible the fishing has been. One said “it gets worse everyday”.

Finding fish here isn’t the problem. Properly presenting the correct fly is the challenge. For an hour I tried the usual suspects, size 24 and 26 midges with no luck. I switched to a bigger fly, probably a size 18, green annelid.

Got lucky and found something they wanted to eat. Over roughly an hour and a half I hooked up with four very nice fish. The first hookup looked like one of the monsters. I’m not bragging cause I didn’t land it. Perhaps I had him on for a half minute. I netted the next two fish, both the biggest trout I have ever caught, and I lost the fourth one. I took a photo of the first one I landed and got it back into the water. It swam away.

Noticeably more crowded today and I’m sure tomorrow so I’m just going to hang out today and probably tomorrow. Might tie up a couple of homemade leaders. Don’t need them but I like dicking around with fly stuff.

The San Juan River is a “Tailwater” river. A tailwater river’s water is constantly coming out of the base of a dam. The water is very cold. After an hour or two of wading in the San Juan my feet hurt from the cold but in this environment it doesn’t take long to warm them up. The dam was built to create the lake not to create a world famous trout river. They got lucky with the incredible insect life that thrives in the river created by the dam. The river is stocked but many fish survive to become huge. In the 3 1/2 miles of “Quality Waters” just below the dam it is catch and release. You can only fish with a single debarbed hook. There are between 14,000 and 15,000 fish in each mile of the “Quality Water”.

Fished for a couple of hours and it’s the first time I’ve fished the San Juan and did not see anyone catch a fish. There have been times I got skunked but it’s the first time everyone was skunked and there were plenty of fishermen.

I watched active large trout feeding but couldn’t get a hit on the usual flies. They must have been targeting something we weren’t aware of.

Randy, my guide three years ago told me this area is supported by natural gas. White pickups with little antennas are everywhere. Many antennas have small flags. Randy told me this is so the drivers can see each other. The trucks are driven by employees of the energy company and Randy said if you go into Aztec NM residential areas almost every driveway will have a white truck in it. Small extraction sites with small storage tanks are everywhere. The following three photos are from one spot on the 2 mile washboard road that leads to my campground. I stopped, got out, and took three photos by just turning around. I counted eight of them in those two miles.

Hopefully better fishing tomorrow.

Not much to report. After five full days of driving in a minimum of 90 degrees I felt spent. I’m not 50 anymore. I hiked down to the river, fished an hour and a half and went back to my trailer and drank several bottles of water and slept for an hour or two.

A day or two ago I posted a video of a man catching a 30 inch brown trout. I watched that guy for a bit today. I had walked behind him next to shore and listened to him scold his client a little bit. His client may have been fly fishing for the first time but caught a couple of fish. Anyway, I walked about fifty feet by him right next to the bank. A guy coming from the other direction asked me “Is that Andy?” We talked briefly and I said that I had seen a video of a guy catching a 30 inch brown trout. He said “That’s him, Andy Kim. They call him the “Trout Vacuum””. The guy was very nice. He showed me the flies to use. They were tied by Andy. I had never seen a fisherman carrying so much high end gear as the guy I was talking to. . I would say more than half of fly fisherman wear a vest and most of the others have some kind of small backpack or sling.

There were maybe 10 fisherman today. Most were sight-fishing, standing on the bank or just in the river, and casting short distances to cruising trout. Tomorrow I’ll give that a shot.

Not going to fish today. I meant to get a tube of sunscreen while in Aztec NM yesterday evening but forgot. I’ve always planned on visiting Canyon de Chelly, pronounced de SHAY like Shea Stadium, so I’m going to go there today and pick the sunscreen up during the trip.

Here is a link for a little info on Canyon de Chelly

It’s a four hour drive to Cottonwood Campground on the San Juan River. Check-in isn’t until 4 pm so I can relax a little bit this morning.

Here is a photo from today’s drive across northern New Mexico, a beautiful area.

Was setup at around 4 at my site at Cottonwood Campground in Navajo Lake State Park.

Here is a YouTube link that shows the possibilities. This guide caught this monster on a $50, Walmart rod and reel combination.

and this is what they eat. This is my San Juan River fly box

Made it to Cimarron Canyon State Park in New Mexico. My campsite is quite the disappointment but I’ll only be here for around 16 hours. The canyon is beautiful and if I wasn’t dragging a trailer and instead was tent camping I would be in a beautiful campground. I am in a parking lot. Oh well.