A couple months ago, a good friend of mine, Dan Dee, showed me a technique for catching stripers that he learned in the Lakes around San Diego. A successful guide there showed him a fly they use to cast and troll for stripers. Dan use to live in the Bay area. He is good friends with Al Whitehurst (the King of SL Flyfishing) and knows how to catch the big ones in San Luis. He now lives in Ennis Montana on the banks of the Madison–the holy land. I digress. Last month I dissected one of the flies he gave me and today we fished the main lake at San Luis Reservoir for the first time with the different flies. The weather was exceptional! NO WIND! There were water skiers on the main lake and for a holiday weekend it was not crowded–less than a dozen boats on the entire lake.

My friend Rick Pilgrim and I took off from Basalt around 7:00am and trolled flies to the Bay of Pigs picking up about 16 fish with about half of them decent. After putzing around in the BOP looking for the pigs with no luck, we decided to head for the underwater Island near Romero. Lots of pigs there on the graph. We had good success… We had a double hookup with the two largest fish. We did not get hassled by the Rangers this trip fishing too close to the dam although with the sun buff over my head I did look a little like Al Qaeda. The rangers did og us a little but when they saw us with fly rods, they must have assumed we were patriotic Americans enjoying the 4th and let us slide today. Osama is dead, let us fish up against the dam and the racks again. The water temp was 61 degrees and there was a huge algae bloom in the water column reducing the visibility. The boat came out of the water green.

Flying a Striper on a Windless San Luis Resevoir from Meng Syn DDS on Vimeo.