07-05-2006, 05:39 PM
Sorry that this report is four days late, but I've been off-line with the holiday weekend and all.
A non-BFTer friend and I arrived at Electric Lake on Saturday morning around 6:30 a.m. Once we saw all of the camp trailers parked at various points around the lake, we thought the translucent water would soon be swarming with boaters and bank tanglers. Gladly, we were wrong.
From the many portable generators we heard humming to the several small grills we saw smoking, I assume that the urges to watch DVDs and flame sides of beef were just too great to allow for any kind of fishing diversion, which suited me and my friend just fine. It left more unencumbered real estate for us to fish, though we would discover that we really didn't need much space after all.
After we launched the boat, we headed straight for the east side of the lake, which was the side opposite to all of the small camper communities. For the first hour or so we had zero luck with minnows, worms, and even silly putty couldn't coax a bite for us. We decided to pull up anchor and move.
We happened upon a small spring that was gurgling from the side of the steep east canyon wall and flowing down into the lake. We immediately saw hordes of minnows swimming near the inlet, so we dropped anchors. I tossed out a minnow below a bobber, while my friend fished with a worm below a bobber.
It wasn't long before my friend's bobber took the plunge, and he soon reeled in a nice vibrantly colored cutthroat, about 15" long. After several more fish on his part, while I good-naturedly gave him "atta-boys" from the sidelines, I decided to tie on a worm hook trailer below my minnow hook and try the wriggling, crawly thing for myself. The rest is, shall we say, "history."
I believe I caught only one fish on the minnow, and when things slowed down on the crawler end of things, I believe I caught three or four more on PowerPutty, but most of the fish succomed to the worms for both of us that day.
I'm not quite sure how many fish we caught on Saturday. We probably boated around 15-20 fish between the two of us and long-line released a few more. We released most of the fish we boated, but the ones who decided to ingest the worms clear down to their fannies, we kept. After being deboned and deskinned, their deep salmon-colored flesh made for a nice dinner on Sunday afternoon.
E Lake cutts are notorious for their wimpy fighting skills, and for some reason they never seem to grow to gigantic sizes. There are certainly enough minnows in the lake for the cutts to get downright porky, but they don't.
The absolutely gorgeous alpine scenery surrounding Electric Lake and the drop-dead lovely colors on the cutts themselves more than make up for their anemic tussles, however. On the way up Fairview Canyon, we spotted several deer, some being button bucks sporting newly grown branches of velvet. I couldn't have dreamed a more beautiful day on picturesque E Lake or during the drives up and down Fairview Canyon.
We packed it up and were home around 3 p.m. Sorry there are no pictures of the trip. I need to start packin' the digital with me on trips such as this. Some of the scenes I witnessed were truly postcard-worthy, and any of those lovely cutts we caught could have certainly graced the covers of the latest Field & Stream issue.
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A non-BFTer friend and I arrived at Electric Lake on Saturday morning around 6:30 a.m. Once we saw all of the camp trailers parked at various points around the lake, we thought the translucent water would soon be swarming with boaters and bank tanglers. Gladly, we were wrong.
From the many portable generators we heard humming to the several small grills we saw smoking, I assume that the urges to watch DVDs and flame sides of beef were just too great to allow for any kind of fishing diversion, which suited me and my friend just fine. It left more unencumbered real estate for us to fish, though we would discover that we really didn't need much space after all.
After we launched the boat, we headed straight for the east side of the lake, which was the side opposite to all of the small camper communities. For the first hour or so we had zero luck with minnows, worms, and even silly putty couldn't coax a bite for us. We decided to pull up anchor and move.
We happened upon a small spring that was gurgling from the side of the steep east canyon wall and flowing down into the lake. We immediately saw hordes of minnows swimming near the inlet, so we dropped anchors. I tossed out a minnow below a bobber, while my friend fished with a worm below a bobber.
It wasn't long before my friend's bobber took the plunge, and he soon reeled in a nice vibrantly colored cutthroat, about 15" long. After several more fish on his part, while I good-naturedly gave him "atta-boys" from the sidelines, I decided to tie on a worm hook trailer below my minnow hook and try the wriggling, crawly thing for myself. The rest is, shall we say, "history."
I believe I caught only one fish on the minnow, and when things slowed down on the crawler end of things, I believe I caught three or four more on PowerPutty, but most of the fish succomed to the worms for both of us that day.
I'm not quite sure how many fish we caught on Saturday. We probably boated around 15-20 fish between the two of us and long-line released a few more. We released most of the fish we boated, but the ones who decided to ingest the worms clear down to their fannies, we kept. After being deboned and deskinned, their deep salmon-colored flesh made for a nice dinner on Sunday afternoon.
E Lake cutts are notorious for their wimpy fighting skills, and for some reason they never seem to grow to gigantic sizes. There are certainly enough minnows in the lake for the cutts to get downright porky, but they don't.
The absolutely gorgeous alpine scenery surrounding Electric Lake and the drop-dead lovely colors on the cutts themselves more than make up for their anemic tussles, however. On the way up Fairview Canyon, we spotted several deer, some being button bucks sporting newly grown branches of velvet. I couldn't have dreamed a more beautiful day on picturesque E Lake or during the drives up and down Fairview Canyon.
We packed it up and were home around 3 p.m. Sorry there are no pictures of the trip. I need to start packin' the digital with me on trips such as this. Some of the scenes I witnessed were truly postcard-worthy, and any of those lovely cutts we caught could have certainly graced the covers of the latest Field & Stream issue.
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