Home for the Holidays

Fishing Time: Early morning of December 16 and 30

Weather:  Unseasonably warm, T-50s, slight breeze

Moon Phase: New Moon, 80% Moon

Location: Flaming Gorge

Water Temp: 43 degrees

Best Bait: 7-inch tube jig, rainbow pattern - 1 ounce jighead

Who Went:  Bobber John, Dunc

I was able to sneak out of the house a couple times while home for the holidays.  I made two extreme day trips to Flaming Gorge.  My first trip on December 16, ended up a disaster.  To start, my fish finder was acting up and not showing fish or our jigs deeper than 70 feet.  With most of the lake trout we fish for at 90+ ft this was not good.  We spent about an hour of prime fishing hours messing with my fish finder trying to get it to work.  We finally got it to work okay, but not great.  After a decade my finder may be on its last leg! 

We fished most our areas and were not seeing many fish.  We finally settled on a nice hump and saw a for sure fish right on the bottom.  We dropped our jigs and within seconds I had a good hit and it was fish on.  I started playing the fish as normal, but he started taking a big run and my rod doubled over beneath the boat.  It was a long run and before it was over, my line snapped!  I have never had this happen at Flaming Gorge while fishing for lake trout.  I was devastated to say the least.

Bobber John was able to entice one more bit for the morning, but did not hook up.  I was left with the haunted feeling of losing a good fish all the way home.  If felt like a trip home from Wendover after dropping a $1,000 on gambling.  Not a fun feeling.  It’s still haunting me!

When I arrived home, I researched my fish finder and soon realized that I have never installed any updates since I purchased it in 2009.  Apparently, there are a bunch of updates from Lowrance that need to be installed.  Whoops.  I went ahead and updated everything hoping that was the issue.

We arrived at Flaming Gorge for round 2 on December 30, and the first thing I did was check my fish finder.  Yep good to go.  Yes!  Now on to finding fish.  Uh, where did they all go?  It was the weirdest Flaming Gorge trip I have ever experienced.  We could not find fish anywhere.  I’ve had many trips where you see fish on every hump, but can’t get them to bite, but it’s very rare to have a trip where you don’t see fish.  We fished searched hard, finding a lonesome straggler here and there.  Luckily, I did get one hit and landed a small 8-10 pounder just to avoid the two trip skunk. 

This year is crazy warm and the water temps are much warmer than usual for this time of year.  My only thought is that it has changed their patterns and the fish aren’t where we expect them to be.  It will probably take a cold snap to push them into normal winter patterns.  Either way, it was a disappointing winter at the Gorge.