I’ve determined that you have to take an extended vacation periodically to maintain sanity at the workplace and home. Last week I staged my mental health getaway.

After work on Friday I came home and went straight to bed as I was going to embark on a 17 hour drive starting at 1:30a Saturday morning. Destination…. Breckenridge Colorado. It had been a long week preparing for my departure and it was going to be an extremely long day.

My iPad alarm quietly started playing Kaki King’s “Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers” at an obnoxious hour. The house came alive with exhausted people packing up the Saab for the long trip. My daughter didn’t even go to sleep as she just got home from working her waitress job.

I decided to take the shortest route to Breckenridge, even though it was surely the most boring and least scenic. I was on my way to Dalhart Texas which has to be the most awful place in Texas and possibly the US. If you haven’t been there, picture those old westerns with tumbleweeds blowing across the street, throw in a Sonic and you have a good idea of what makes up Dalhart.

After what seemed like an eternity, we arrived in Dalhart and stopped at the local Sonic to eat some awful burgers. Yes, the Dalhart Sonic messed up the burgers. We got #1 burgers with cold meat. We ate them anyway and got the hell out of there.

The scenery in Colorado started to get more interesting though I think it was the anticipation. We were going to a house that my father-in-law’s client let us use for the week, free of charge. We heard it was pretty nice but I was apprehensive. I think it’s my nature to be skeptical. That’s the damn product manager in me.

We started passing rivers that I had only read about… the South Platte.. the Arkansas and finally the Blue River. I knew the Blue River as I fished it way back on my way moving from Utah to Texas.

I had planned to fish all over the Blue River while I was in CO but my timing was wrong. June turns out to be snow runoff time which blows out almost all the rivers.

I had been conversing with Ned Parker of Breckenridge Outfitters for a week or two. He gave me the bad news a few days earlier that fishing the rivers was going to be less than ideal. He suggested a day of lake floating. As you may know, I’m not a big stillwater fishing fan but he was passionate that it was going to be the best fishing in the area for a while.

We arrived at Breckenridge around 5 amid a minor ice storm. That can’t be good for the fishing prospects either.

I won’t go into it in detail, but the house was incredible. It was a 5 bedroom house at the top of a mountain with a dry sauna, wine cellar, 2 large screen tv’s, large deck on the back, and a walk to Swan Creek below us.

My brother-in-law wanted to learn to fly fish so I let him use my beloved Ross Cimarron Reel and a Fly Logic rod I got off of eBay a few years back. It should be a good learning rig (which I gave to him as a present at the end of the trip).

Even the little creek was pretty blown out. The private side of the water which we were on was very hard to fish from as it was at an extreme angle. We tried a couple of fly combos and called it a day. Neither of us saw a fish. He was starting to get the hang of casting and didn’t even lose a fly which is more than I can say.

We then ran over to the “stair steps” part of the Blue which was across the street from the small local college.

Here, I caught a little Rainbow maybe 8 or 9 inches. It was the first trout Wade had seen in person and he thought it was quite a pretty fish.

On Tuesday, I took my father-in-law and Wade out to Montgomery Reservoir as Ned suggested it as a good water to let some newbies try out fly fishing. Here’s a picture of the lake.

No hits until Wade went over to a water intake which was flowing down the mountain and let a pink San Juan worm drift in the current with Thingamabobber as an indicator. He caught 2 small rainbows there and I think may have picked up the fly fishing bug. I got a few hits but didn’t land any.

Next up was a whitewater rafting trip down the Blue from Performance Tours. Even though it wasn’t fly fishing, it was a blast. Here are a couple of pics from the trip.

Thursday was the day I had been waiting for… the guided trip day.

The previous day, Ned called to say that even the lake wasn’t going to be good on Thursday as the forecast called for 30 to 50 mph wind gusts. I decided to switch to a half day trip and just fish the local streams.

I started at 8:00am at his shop in downtown Breckenridge. We hopped in his truck and headed to Silverthorne by the outlet mall. Not exactly the most scenic fishing, but still a nice river location.

The water was getting clear and we bounced between a few different calm water areas. We saw some small trout and a bunch of fry’s. I caught a little wild brown that was pretty satisfying.

After finishing that section we headed over to the star step section of the Blue.

I was expecting a bunch of small fish in the 8 to 10 inch range so my expectations weren’t very high. Turns out that some of the largest fish on the Blue come from this area. Ok, getting interesting.

I worked a few sections and then crossed a bridge where Ned started noticing a few trout holding in very shallow water.

Soon, we saw a nice fish actively feeding. I tried about 5 or 6 different flies to no avail. This fish wasn’t interested in my presentations. We were getting ready to leave and I tried another cast. She turned around and took it! Next thing you know, Ned has the fish in the net and it’s time for pictures.

That was so satisfying. I’m not used to targeting a single fish and then coming out victorious. Too put it oh so elegantly.. that rocked.

To summarize, Ned was the best guide I’ve ever had. So knowledgeable and he genuinely seemed to be enjoying helping me catch fish. I’ve had good guides in the past but none that I would recommend as highly as Ned. I can’t wait to get back to Colorado during better conditions. What a trip and sanity restored.

Had a really nice trip out to Hamilton Pool yesterday. Fishing isn’t allowed but I did take some pictures. It’s worth the short drive out there for the hike. Hamilton Pool flows out to Hamilton Creek which connects to the Pedernales River. The first pic below is close to where the creek connects to the River.

Some pics from my Flickr account:

In the low desert mountains of New Mexico, meandering between the dry, brush covered arid hills, flows a gin-clear, trout-infested oasis of a stream. 5 miles of the Rio Penasco are on Charlie Mulcock’s ranch about 10 miles outside of the tiny town of Mayhill, NM. The ranch has been in his family for 106 years. Recently, he started the Penasco Spring River Fly Fishing Club.

On Thursday, I made the 10 hour drive out to Alamogordo NM with my brother. David was there on business so it worked out perfectly.

My plan was to fish on Mulcock Ranch on Friday and fish on some of the streams around Ruidoso on Saturday. The only flyshop in the area shutdown a while back so my Ruidoso trip was going to be based on a couple of books I got from Amazon.

• Fly-Fishing in Southern New Mexico (Coyote Books (Albuquerque, N.M.).)
• New Mexico (Flyfisher’s Guides)

Both books warned that rivers in Southern New Mexico aren’t like western ones. Many are seasonal and most can be stepped across without getting wet. For some reason, I still had high hopes for Ruidoso area flyfishing. More on that soon.

I arrived at the ranch on Friday around 8:15a.

It was a cool morning in the upper 40′s but it didn’t feel chilly. Must have been my adrenaline. I drove for over 10 hours for this opportunity so I was beyond excited when I got to Charlie’s house. We exchanged greetings and went in to his house to talk about flies and look over an aerial map of his property. I brought 3 hodgepodge boxes which he determined held flies which should be adequate for the day.

Charlie had about an hour of work he needed to accomplish with the cattle that morning so he showed me to the first spot at one end of the property.

I initially tried a wooly bugger and nymph dropper. The water was deep in spots and only about 3-5 feet across. There was lots of great vegetation and clear water. I was definitely sight fishing for a change.

Some really nice trout came out of hiding to chase after the combo but they would always refuse and return to their holding spot. I moved upstream and continued fishing. I ran across a monster fish under a high bank but couldn’t get him to even approach the flies. About this time, Charlie showed back up to show me the variety of water he had on the property.

Following the tour, Charlie dropped me off with his 4 wheel drive Land Rover and I was on my way. I started near the waterfall in the picture above and worked upstream. I never found an easy way to get into the canyon though with so much water, I decided to save it for another trip. I ended up landing four nice sized Rainbows and long distance landed 2 others. I also hooked up a hog that broke my dropper off. I would have loved to get a better look but in my mind he must have been approaching 20 inches.

Overall, the trip was very worth the long drive. Charlie was a wonderful host and I really wish I lived closer. I would join the club in a second if I didn’t have to take a 3 – 4 day weekend to utilize it. If anyone is looking for a very reasonably priced club to join, it’s worth the $100 to check it out. You’ll be very pleasantly surprised. Tell Charlie that you read about it on my blog.

Now on to my second day. Not much to write home about since I never found water or water worth fishing. Ruidoso (as I was warned by some friendly locals who were on the ranch), was a dud.

The Rio Riodoso was easy to get to but I could tell by a quick look down in a ravine, couldn’t sustain anything but trout from a truck. I’m guessing that they would have been fished out within a few minutes of being transplanted from the hatchery. Not my kind of fishing.

I ended up coming back on Saturday instead of waiting until Sunday. Although I got home around 4:15a Sunday morning, it was so nice waking up in my own bed instead of having to spend another whole day driving back

Had a great trip overall and will be back to get that fish that took my bh nymph.

With wife and 7 yr old gone on a family and friends trip to LA, I have some time on my hands and therefore went fishing. I did fish a few weeks back on the Llano River, but just never got around to blogging about it. The Llano trip didn’t have any of my normal award winning (ha) photos since I wore a lanyard and didn’t have a place to put my iPhone.

I started out today with grand thoughts of an all day trip to some remote hill country stream but that soon disappeared with the last glimpse of civilized temperatures mid morning. Instead, I decided to trek up to Round Rock to see the Living Waters Fly Shop and see what waters they would suggest.

I got there around 1:00p. It was already about 102 outside. Chris, the owner, said that I should just run behind the shop and try out Brushy Creek. I had never been there so I gave it a shot. I picked up a few flies including my first ever moth fly. It was a little white fuzzy fly with black eyes. Chris told me to start with a little hopper first to see if they were coming to the surface.

I left the shop, took a right and followed the road about .75 miles to the first crossing. There was a convenient pull off past the bridge that I carefully guided my wife’s Mini into and parked. The creek was behind a neighborhood. It reminded me of the creeks that I used to play on when I was a kid. Probably only 2 feet high at the deepest but absolutely filled with fish. I had hoped to pick up some wading sandals at the fly shop, but Chris convinced me that I should just use my standard wading boots. Therefore, I only had some flip flops on. These were far from ideal for slopping around in a sliming creek. Lack of appropriate footwear kept me confined to about a 15 foot area. I spent about an hour in those 15 feet having a blast sight casting to little fish with my Sage 5 wt. I only landed one as the majority of the takers weren’t much bigger than my hopper. The one unlucky fish was a large panfish that had a perch body and a bass mouth. I’ll have to look up what it was.

After the strong urge to move upstream but equally strong counter urge to not walk around on the slippery rocks in my flip flops won out, I decided to head home. Probably not going to be high on my return visit list but it was nice and convenient so a possibility if I’m in the North part of Austin.

On another note, I used my Water Walker Lanyard that Rick made for me. I haven’t posted a review yet and I apologize sincerely for that. The lanyard is based on the Southwestern model. You can look at the pictures on his site but they don’t do it justice. The workmanship is top notch and they are honestly really good looking. I’ve seen lanyards in stores and picked them up and thought that they were overpriced for a piece of string that runs around your neck, but Rick’s look like they cost an awful lot more than the prices on his site. The connectors are all top notch and it’s so comfortable that you forget it’s on. I’ll take some pictures of it close up tomorrow but in the meantime, here’s one of the lanyard on me at Brushy Creek.

I had one hell of a fly fishing day last Monday. I was on a business trip to Salt Lake City. The conference didn’t start until Tuesday so I saw a really nice opportunity to get in some fishing on my old home river. The Provo River is in such a beautiful setting that even if I didn’t catch any fish, I would be thrilled to just be in the midst of the grand snow covered mountains surrounding the Heber Valley.

I wanted to better my chances of catching trout so I hired a guide from Four Seasons Fly Fishers. His name is Craig Costa.

I met him at the store around 9:15am. The sky was clear and the ground was covered in snow. The temperature was in the teens but it didn’t feel that bad. I think the adrenalin warmed me up.

We went to an area outside of Midway to start. We trudged through the snow with pretty high hopes of catching some fish on a 2 fly rig with midge nymph dropper.

We tried a few locations before I finally caught a trout. It wasn’t a big fish, but it was still a cold water trout. Something I miss in Texas quite a bit.

I ended up catching 5 fish including one on accident when I wasn’t looking and a white fish which I had never caught one before. It had one hell of a set of kissers on it. It fought very differently from a trout but it was still fun.

I think I did about as good as anybody could on that could day. We saw a very small midge hatch and no BWO’s which were supposed to have started already.

Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the trip and Craig, my guide, was outstanding. He taught me a lot about rigging up the optimal set up for nymphing on the Provo and also on finding where the fish are. He was very easy to talk to. I had a great conversation with him. We even had some stuff in common.

After the fishing subsided, I was off to the AEG Media Fly Fishing Film tour in Salt Lake City. It was great to see the turnout (about 300 people) who were all there with the same interest. Much was said about the Pebble Mine issue in Alaska. I’m absolutely appalled by it and am telling everyone I know to get involved. It’s something that we do have a say in and should do the right thing and not be silent.

Back to the working world and warm water fishing.