Logan River 8/19

[gstott]

I decided to take a break from the bass and head up Logan Canyon today. I've been curious about the Franklin Basin area, so I headed there first. I got up there around 11. There was some construction going on up there and lots of rather large and noisy dump trucks going up and down the road. Not really my first choice for company while fly fishing a mountain stream, but I gave it a go anyways. The water looked great with tons of good pocket water, but it didn't produce as well as I'd hoped. I fished for about 45 minutes and scored 5 cutts with a number of refusals on a small turks with a hare's ear dropper. Not bad, but I was hoping for faster action considering how fishy the water looked. The rocks were extremely slick, and the trucks were getting on my nerves, so I ran down to just above Red Banks as I'd never tried there either. First cast brought a nice cutthroat on top. I was expecting it to be fast and furious, but it slowed down to a strike here or there. I caught a few more cutts, and the wind started blowing pretty hard making it tough to get a good cast or drift. Well, I wasn't blown away by this upper Logan stuff, so I headed a little lower to one of my favorite stretches. I'm glad I did. I pulled a few nice cutts and a brown out of the first run. I had switched over to a prince for my dropper, and was doing well, but I noticed that some caddis were beginning to come off. So I switched over to a foam bodied rubber legged stimmy caddis sort of thing I recently slapped together and put a caddis emerger below it. That was the ticket. I began catching fish pretty consistently. The fish were being pretty spazzy, so I was missing a bunch, but by 2:30 I was up to 28 fish for the day. I had to tear myself away and run down the canyon to see if work needed me, which they didn't, so back up the canyon I went. I kept taking cutts and some browns as I worked my way up. I pulled the dry out of a really nice browns mouth, but most of the browns were 12" or under. The cutts averaged a bit larger with many in the 12-16" range. The last run I fished had an interesting surprise, an albino. He came out from an undercut and followed my fly but didn't take. So I cast back to him and right when my fly got to him my fly disappeared. I set the hook, and the albino didn't move. A feisty cutt had snatched the fly before he could get it. I kept working him, taking two more cutts (one of which had a Utah State tag on his back) before he finally sucked in my dropper. Catching an albino was really odd as I was quite a ways above the impoundments. I guess he's more ambitious than his buddies. Anyway, I fished until about 6:45 and ended up with 54 fish. Maybe 15 browns, the albino, and the rest were cutts. The weather was just warm enough, and the fishing was great. I just might be tempted to give the bass a rest again soon.
[signature]