A Year In The Dark

Whaa, where am I, what is this shit on my face, my god what is that awful smell ((tm) Sublime)What happened?? We're.. We're alive!  

We've been radio silent for the past year mostly on account of too much work, life and too lazy to post a report.  Not to mention our infrequent outings have not really warranted a post, but we probably should have anyway just to help keep the page active.  At any rate, for one reason or another we've elected to revive ourselves and start living again.  For myself, the kids are finally old enough to almost wipe their own asses and things are starting to return to a semblance of normalcy, kinda.  We have been fortunate enough to get away over the past year and do our typical big game archery hunts but fishing had been the sacrifice.  Since Pyramid opened up this year ( I'll add some shameless text to help the Google search relevance by saying "this year at Pyramid Lake Nevada 2014 / 2015 Fly Fishing #KimKardashian " ) we've managed to make it out to the lake just about once each weekend.  To date, our haul has been fair but the fishing in general at Pyramid has been pretty good.  If you've been paying attention, Pyramid Lake has started to become extremely consistent with it's big fish production.   The wall at Crosby's probably doesn't have room for fish under 15 lbs at this point.  It seems like any given day on any given beach, at least one head will bring a 10 lb cutt to net, snap a cell phone pic and let er go back to make more pigs.  It seems like every week there is a new pic of dude with another 20 pound piggy hauled in and many of them are getting released to keep this good thing going. 

There is also the buzz around the Pilot Peak strain of the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout and their successful reintroduction to Pyramid Lake and (most importantly) resumption of their heavy feeding and excessively fast growth tendency.  If the Pilot Peak trend continues upward, we may all sport a desktop background of our selves hoisting up the 30lb Pyramid LCT that up to now only exists in crusty black and white photo's taken by guys who remember a time when the Ichthyosaur wasn't chalk .  To make things more promising, the Pilot Peak fish have been confirmed to be spawning up the Truckee for the first time since they bit the dust.  There is a good story on the rediscovery of the strain HERE (might not be the original publishing but seems to be about the same thing I read a while back).  To further promote Pyramid Lake's management strategy, none of the pigs, that I know of, have the green tag indicative of the Pilot Peak strain, nor has the effort been in place long enough to produce pilots of that size.  Full disclosure, I'm not a marine biologist and may be totally wrong but what basic knowledge that I do have says that what the Pyramid Lake Tribe and US Fish and Wildlife are doing is working beyond just the potential of the pilots.  

That's probably enough chit chat for now so we'll move to what most folks are looking for when googling "Pyramid Lake Fly Fishing".  There are plenty of sites out there with occasional reports but far and away Gilligan's Guide Service has been the most common by my weekly research posting two or three reports each week.  As Gilligan reports and as we have found, the season started out variable with the warm water but was plenty fun with the chub clouds.  Over the past month the water temps have dropped and production is getting real good for the shore casters.  The standard approaches are working, shooting buggers and beetles as well as nymphing on the bottom.  My visits out to the lake have all been on the pontoon but I can't say I've been much if any more productive than the gents on shore recently.  Back in October I spent a full day out in the pontoon and had better luck than the guys stuck on shore but since the temps have migrated southward the fish have migrated inward.  That said, I still like the pontoon so I can get out away from the crowd a bit and pick my nose or piss in relative privacy.  The beaches are starting to look like a pier fishing scene in a movie, nuts to butts, you'll probably get to know the group next to you pretty well.  More specifically on the fly selection, the midnight cowboy buggers and wooly worms have been a typical main stay along with your olives, browns, chartreuse and white patterns.  The foam beetle / tadpole in white with chartreuse underbody has shown the most success for me but the black patterns have had positive reports as well.  On the nymph topic, I broke my 8wt fast rod tip on the opener so I was using my 7wt nymph rig to shoot with until my new tip came in so I hadn't been nymphing much.  I did rap with a gent at Indian Head beach who has been focusing hard on the nymph approach and claimed an above average production compared to others stripping buggers and beetles.  On his word, the mahalo family and patriot midge were reliable ranging from size 8 to 16.  From my experience and homeboy's report, the key was ensuring your getting down just off the bottom.  Casting from shore, there's a number of ways to gauge depth but one technique that I liked was to clip your pliers to your bottom fly and (floating fly line just to be clear) with an indicator on the line that isn't secured in place so it acts like a buoy.  When you cast out your line will slip through the indicator down to the bottom and you can eye where the indicator is sitting on your line to give you the depth.  Adjust tippet length if required and start soaking nymphs.  I'd like to give more info on the technique but to be honest am pretty novice on it.  Come spring time, I'd like to boast more proficiency.   It's midnight so here's a little fish porn so I can get to sleep.