Waterdale Ranch 6/7 Jim and Aaron at

What’s not to love about too much private water to fish in a day, a dog greeting service, all the llamas a person could ever want, huge waterfalls, and nobody else around…that’s Waterdale Ranch. Ough yah, there’s good fishing too.

Aaron and Jim were novices from Chicago that were down for some fun. We caught a good number of wild browns and rainbows with some nice stocked rainbows in the mix also. The first spot we fished tested Aaron to a fast moving river crossing that got the flatlander’s sea-legs working…or so I thought. Right away Aaron hooked into fish on a blue poison tongue fly. I was downriver and was running up to get a net on the fish when I slipped on a rock for an early morning dip in the river. I too am from Chicago, and had a flatlander moment. I got up quick to look at Aaron as the fish popped off the hook…ough well, a fish on the line is a great start. Within the next 10 casts Aaron puts another one on and we get one a nice wild brown in the net. When Aaron hooked another one in the next 5 minutes, Jim moved to the other side of the river next to Aaron. Soon after he too found his hand on a nice wild brown. We continued to catch fish, hooking some nice stocked rainbows that continuously gave us challenging fights. Aaron had his indicator dunk underwater and went for a big hook-set but slipped on a rock and fell in the water. It wouldn’t have been a bad dunk hadn’t Aaron continue to slip and flail in the water like an injured bird. It was one of the longest continuous falls I’ve seen to date…it was great fun for all. Aaron’s a good sport, we all had a great laugh, and he got right back in that hole and stuck that fish. There might have been a little wager during the fight about weather or not we were going to land the big fish, and sure enough, in the net he went.

Jim hooked one that took-off downriver in a hurry, we tried to run downriver after it, but couldn’t get it in the net in time and the hook popped out of the fishes mouth. When I checked the hooks, the blue poison tongue hook was straightened almost completely strait. I fixed the line back up and Jim he soon got a re-match on a slightly smaller rainbow that we were able to put in the net.

Aaron hooked another one that peeled some line off downriver, came back up river right back at us, and then tried to wrap the line up around a low hanging tree. He did a good job of keeping the line taught the whole time and was able to keep him from reaching the sunken branches. The fish then took off again across river, we quickly moved downriver after it, and got it in the net.

After lunch we fished the big waterfalls and it fished lights out. There were a pile of brown trout under the falls that we eating the blue poison tongue as well as the soft hackle sow bug on a regular basis. Aaron and Jim traded turns landing fish after fish. It was a good day of catching.