Anglers go with flow to enhance excitement

PARSHALL — For someone wading deep enough to experience intense tingling in certain parts of the male anatomy, a thermometer test hardly seemed necessary. Yet when the reading blinked a shivery 48 degrees, it caught two visitors by surprise.
One does not expect such a temperature on the Colorado River on the last day of July, not where overheated temperature and low flow had made this a sort of poster place for the state's summer water woes.


Yet here we were, up to the limits of our wading ability at the Kemp-Breeze State Wildlife Area, where the river gushed along at a robust 400 cubic feet per second and thoughts of heat-stressed trout seemed very far away.


The chilly temperature arrived, of course, courtesy of the dam on the nearby Williams Fork tributary. The reservoir is full, and the inflow of 130 cfs passes straight through with its moderating effect on the main stem of the Colorado.
All of which brings a sigh of relief to Colorado Division of Wildlife biologist Jon Ewert, who orchestrates a delicate balancing act on a stretch of river that remains Exhibit A in the state's struggle with whirling disease. With everything else on his plate, Ewert is happy that water woes at a highly popular public fishery are not among them.


Conditions are more problematic above the Williams Fork confluence. The temperature at Hot Sulphur Springs on Thursday soared well above 60.
"Aug. 10-12 usually is the warmest it gets. After that, nights start to cool," Ewert said of a danger that likely won't develop this year because of extended runoff.


Ewert said continuing concern about midsummer temperature below Windy Gap caused a consortium of agencies to explore ways to store runoff in Granby Reservoir, where it could be dispensed when needed.


Anglers, meanwhile, benefit from an almost perfect flow that prompts a riot of insect hatches — everything from ghost-like trico mayflies to wildly fluttering Yellow Sally stoneflies. Added




water serves to spread the trout, making more fishing room at a place that often suffers from its very success. All of this creates a lot of excitement but doesn't necessarily hype the catch rate. On a day when elation and frustration played a lively pingpong match, each change of flies seemed good for a couple of fish, no more.


Jim Lewis performed this two-step dance first with a nondescript nymph, then a Sally, then a caddis. His partner caught two fish on a Gold-Ribbed Hare's Ear, doubled on a trico, then sweltered in frustration as afternoon heat put down both fish and fishermen.
One of the trout was a modest rainbow, which, by Ewert's calculation, makes up from 5 to 10 percent of a biomass dominated by browns in the two decades since the incursion of whirling disease.


To shift that balance, the biologist in October will introduce in public water downstream from Byers Canyon 80,000 5-inch rainbows mixed from the resistant Hofer strain and progeny of the wild rainbow that evolved in this same river.
Aided by a crash in the population of tubifex worms blamed for advancing the disease, Ewert hopes this new strain will grow progressively more robust and wild through several generations of stream-bred fish.


"There'll be natural selection pressures to select those that do have resistance," Ewert said.
Ewert's major concern is a low survival rate among the large rainbow fingerlings already stocked in recent years, a lag generally attributed to competition from predatory brown trout.
"Our goal is to get to the point where we don't have to stock any more rainbows, to return to the situation we had in the '70s and '80s," Ewert said.