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Learning to enjoy life again
BOND, COLO. - The trout rose and sipped a mayfly off the surface of the Colorado River. Joshua Williams caught the small disturbance on the water from the corner of his eye. Standing in a drift boat, he raised his fly rod and the trout rose again and gulped in the artificial fly on the end of the line.Suddenly, Williams was in trouble.He'd done this a hundred times before on the rivers and creeks around his home in Virginia, passionately throwing a fly at rising trout, holding the long rod in his right hand and gently stripping in the slack line with his left, a delicate two-handed operation.But on a recent Friday, the 22-year-old Army staff sergeant, who had spent a hellish year engaged in street combat in Iraq, had a problem.He didn't have a right hand.The trout surged into the current. Williams, holding the rod in his left hand, hung on.
Hopper time
I put on my waders, my felt-soled boots and a fleece vest because it felt a little bit cool when I got to the Oldman River. The sky was cloudy, threatening rain. A chilly breeze was sweeping down the valley from the west. But within 20 minutes I was sweating like I was in the tropics, the breeze had stopped and the sun had popped out from behind the clouds. I should have known. Summer might be winding down, but it ain't done yet. I'd come down to the Oldman River below the Three Rivers Dam to try a bit of late-afternoon grasshopper fishing. No, not fishing for grasshoppers. I mean using big flies imitating grasshoppers to fool some trout into playing with me for a bit. It's the time of year for grasshoppers along the river banks to start leaping and flying around looking for mates.
Chubs making a comeback at Strawberry
During the C.A.S.T. (Catch a Special Thrill) event held on Strawberry this past Saturday, I had the opportunity to take a look at the chub population in the Soldier Creek portion -- and the picture wasn't a pretty one. "We've been catching fish right and left," said George Sommer, current president of the TBF Bass Federation, "but all we've caught are adult chubs." It was a fact that the area Sommer and his C.A.S.T. participants were fishing showed a water column littered with adult chubs, that swarmed each bait as it fell towards the bottom. "We thought the cuts (cutthroats) would be biting," continued Sommer, "but we can't seem to get through all the chubs." The same story was repeated several times Saturday. Each time I approached a boat, my fish finder came alive with schools of chubs, which were confirmed as I moved slowly through the shallows so that the chubs became visible to the naked eye.
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