Big Fish Day @ 11 Mile 05Jul17

I took a shot at fishing 11 Mile today and it really payed off - fishing was excellent with flows 110cfs and surprisingly wide open around the top campground. I even landed the biggest fish I've ever caught there, a 22" cutbow! It was a good fight on the 4 wt Winston. I came back from Summit to take care of some stuff in COS since the sailboat was broken (but they called and said it's fixed - yippee). Anyway, I arrived about 8:30am and saw massive mating balls of mayflies as well as egg-laying caddis coming back to the water. While I started nymphing and caught a couple on midges and Cheeseman Emergers, I shifted to dry flies - initially just one mayfly spinner then I dropped a second fly, a foam caddis. The combo was deadly for 90 minutes or more and I caught many fish including the big cutbow on the caddis. I was surprised the caddis worked as well as it did as I only saw a few of them dappling the water. Ultimately I saw some PMD emerging and switched back to sub-surface with a PMD-based nymph rig and that worked to catch a 2nd pretty big cutbow. I wrapped up and came home at 1pm, not even fishing after lunch, as the morning was so good and the skies began to darken and gather. Woohoo.