Fishing Beaver Tailwaters Nov 8th

After a rough weekend last week due to the early and long generation schedule and a tough/long week at work, I was itching to get out there and catch some fish this weekend.

I got up and was at the Beaver Tailwaters just a little after 7am.  I decided to try a new section I haven’t fished before.  I had floated with my daughter a few weekends before, from the dam to Parker Bottoms, and got a chance to scout some new spots.  I was going to start out from the handicap access closest to the dam, and walk down.  When we floated through this area, the fish were really stacked up in there thick and the depth seemed perfect and the movement of the water appeared ideal.  Well as I walked down to the area, everything was so different than what I expected.  I couldn’t find that perfect spot that we had floated over just a few weeks prior.  I decided to go ahead and get started at the top of the area I knew I was supposed to be at.  I started the day with a Black Zebra Midge, size 16, with silver bead and silver wire on 7x tippet.

The water was a lot tougher to fish than I expected.  The water looked beautiful on the far side, but the current near me was moving along quite well.  This made it very tough to keep the midge moving through the zone at the correct speed.  I had to constantly mend and tweak to keep it moving correctly.  I managed to catch 5 or so on this midge in about a 100 meter section.

I decided to keep moving down to fish and explore this new area and eventually ended up at the top of the area I frequently start and fish down.  It’s that walk-in access at the end of the campground.

The wind was fairly strong and pretty consistent coming from the North which made it blow upstream and added more difficulty to the funny moving water that I described earlier.  There were scattered clouds and with all the wind, there was an ever moving situation of full and part sun.

I ended up catching nearly 20 fish in about 4 hours.

The P&P worked well when the sun stayed out.

Below is a Green Olive Midge with a red thorax (pic below).  I haven’t tried tying the red thorax before, but it turned out to produce pretty well.

I also tried the tying the red thorax on a Blue Dun(pic below) and ended up landing a nice 16 incher.  As I was trying to pick up the fish to get a great picture of a nice fish, he went crazy and broke my line taking my prized midge with him.  The thing that made me upset is that I tied two blue dun midges with the red thorax, but I made one with a silver bead and the other with a copper bead.  I quickly found out the fish much preferred the silver bead over the copper bear.  The picture below is with the copper bead, but I would recommend staying with the classic Blue Dun pattern and add the red thorax.

I also did well with a Rootbeer Midge(pic below).  I only had one like this and a fish ended up breaking it off after I caught a few.  I tried the Ruby Midge with the brighter red underbody, but I didn’t get a single bite with that combinations.

All in all it was nice morning fishing!

Happy Fishing and stay Trout Tuff!

Erik-