Early Morning On The Middle Provo

I made a quick trip up to fish the Middle Provo River. It was 18 degrees when I started and gradually warmed as the day went on. I was using rapalas and twitching them through the current. It was a typical provo river experience as far as all the fisherman around goes but I did land 3 fish and had a lot of follows. I'm still tring to perfect fishing with rapalas and I feel I'm getting better each time I go out. It seems that the later in the year we go, the less and less the fish want to play. I plan on hitting a little river down south after Thanksgiving, hopefully it's faster fishing down there. It's ok though, I'm starting to see ice fishing reports so my river fishing is almost done until spring.

19" Provo Brown. My biggest so far on this river.

21" White Fish. He had something funky going on with his belly.

Quick Trip to the Provo River

My father-in-law called me this morning and wanted to hit the lower section of the Provo river. I had a few hours before I needed to leave for the Utes last home game of the season (they won 38-7 against San Diego St) so we went. First off, I've never been a real fan of fishing the Provo river for a few reasons. Despite being a blue ribbon fishery, It's almost always crowded and quite frankly, the river has had my number! I've never been able to catch fish consistently out of the thing! But today I was excited to try out some of the new techniques I learned from fishing the Weber river with Joe the past couple of weeks. We only had an hour and a half to fish and in that time I landed 2 browns and missed a few others. My father-in-law also had a few takes. The first one I caught looked to be a few inches bigger than the one pictured but he decided to unhook himself at my feet before I had a chance to take a picture. It wasn't fast fishing, but I was excited to actually catch more than one fish on the Provo in one trip, which is a first for me. We will definitely have a lot more trips on the Provo, only this time, I have my sights on the middle section.

The Weber River, Take Two

Joe invited me to hit the Weber with him again and I wasn't about to miss out on the opportunity. We fished a different spot on the river from the first time we went in hopes of hooking up with some more big browns. Well, today the fish didn't want to join the party. The bite was slow all day! We had a couple of really nice browns on for a moment only to have them spit the hook. We didn't see any fish on beds today so I guess the spawn has wrapped up for the year. We ended up with 3 fish landed with the biggest going 19". The other 2 were in the 14-15" range. Even though the fishing wasn't as fast as we would have liked, it was still a great day to be out on the river! It won't be to much longer until we'll be getting out the auger and sled for ice fishing season. I'm definitely looking forward to it!

19" Brown Trout

Brown-Out On The Weber River, November 2009

I finally met up with a guy I've been wanting to fish with for a long time. I had read a lot of the Weber River reports that he posts on http://www.bigfishtackle.com/ about the monster brown trout that he catches on a regular basis. I frequent a lot of fishing forums and blogs and don't know of anyone in Utah that consistently catches as many big browns as Joe does. I was fortunate enough to be able to go out with him for a day and learn some of his techniques he uses to land these big beautiful fish.

We met up and were on the river by 9 am. About 20 minutes into fishing, it turned into an all out hog fest! In the 7 hours of fishing, we landed around 20 browns that were 17-21" in length and around that same number that went smaller than that. We also hooked some rainbow trout and mountain white fish. Joe and I both hooked into a few monster browns 24-26" range that spit our rapalas and plastics after some acrobatic fights. Some of those fish that got away were without a doubt the biggest brown trout I have seen while fishing! It was frustrating at times because I couldn't keep a fish hooked to save my life! I missed a dozen or so big browns that would throw my hook back at me after a few seconds of fighting. At the end of the day, I can say that this is one trip that I won't soon forget. Thanks again Joe! I look forward to the next adventure with you!

First fish of the day.

Spawned-out female



21" Beast

This one looked like it was part piranha. Check out those chompers!

Check out the hump ...Awesome!

Nice Weber Rainbow