Fishing Forum

With the busy weekend and little time to fish, a short trip to the Middle was in order on Sunday. It was time to check on a spot that I haven't bothered much this year.

On the ride up, I somehow coerced myself to try a really rocky spot at Deer Creek for an hour or so. That didn't amount to anything, so I got back on track.

Like usual, there were tons of people at the bridge and underneath, but not very many upstream. Getting away from the crowd didn't take long and I got into a mess of planter rainbows pretty quickly. Most of them were pretty small, but they were quick to bite.



One of them had much brighter colors than its buddies.





It seems as though a lot of the browns are getting the fall fungus again, as I saw a couple swimming slowly and some big ones half-buried in the weeds.

Every couple of bends, it seemed, a tightly huddled mass of little rainbows awaited me. That was nice, in between the occasional corpses of diseased browns.

There were plenty of healthy browns too. Most weren't interested and spooked after the first pass with my Blue Fox. Two of them grabbed it as soon as it hit the water though.





Wading upstream, the fishing started getting spotty, so I eventually turned around to try and test my luck at the planter holes from the way up. They yielded fewer numbers coming back, but a couple still took the fox. One rainbow was a bit bigger than the rest and saved me some trouble by tail-walking onto the bank for me.



Casting into a mossy flat got me into something pretty big. It fought lazily and drifted right up to my feet after only a few outbursts. Turns out, it had a really nasty case of the funk. It was also foul-hooked near a fin, so it doesn't really count. It was released to drift off and finish dying in a moss bed like it was probably about to do anyway.





Pretty . It was a good sized brown pushing 20+ and thick. It felt nice and firm in my hand, it just looked horrible and was acting like it was totally worn out from the start. Too bad.

With the fast action for a couple of hours and three for the table, it was a satisfying afternoon on the river after getting the usual treatment from Deer Creek. The trip home was nice and the cliffs in the canyon were glowing from the golden sunset.







Happy Fishing, Humans.
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Nice Work LOAH ... great colors on those fish.
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Nice work, and great pics like always!

I fished the Provo a little over a year ago and had no luck whatsoever. You da man!
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nice report. i have fished that section many times in the past but havent recently. try it in the spring with rapalas, the big browns in there love em.
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anybody know what the deal is with the white fungus? i've never seen it so prominent in other rivers. it's just a bummer to see these large fish die off every year. besides the overcrowding issue, it's gotta be the number one reason why the provo produces few fish over 22-23 inches.
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Nah, it gives the other fish room to grow. Not that I like seeing big fish die, but it all works itself out. I do see it in the Provo more than other places, but it happens in a lot of waters.
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It has been said that it is due to HUMAN hands. The Provo does get pounded, so that could be true.
But I fish the inlet to Echo and the Trout had big old sores on them.
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From what I gathered from a Google search, the condition is called Lymphocystis disease. Caused by a micro-organism known as Iridovirus, the white to yellow, cauliflower-like anomaly is the result of the virus entering abrasions on the skin which result from spawning activity. Underneath the dermis, fibroblasts, which form the connective tissue between skin and muscle, are infected and benign growths emerge. The exposed areas can make the trout susceptible to fungal growth and/or secondary infection. Lymphocystis, reportedly, isn' t 100% fatal, though the mortality rate looks to be fairly high in severe cases.
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good info fishguru. sounds like all the more reason to respect actively spawning fish and leave them alone when we see them on the reds. maybe it's just an unavoidable complication of old age, but it would be nice to see some of these big fish survive the fall/winter without developing the fungus.
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