I ❤️ Beaver

This week I fished the Beaver River for 3 days, and a day at Kent’s Lake mixed in.

We stayed at the KOA in Beaver, Utah. It’s a two horse town off I-15 between Cedar City and nowhere.

The river runs East to West, and used to run through town, I think, but now it gets diverted, before town, from the the river in the mountains to farm irrigation. The upper mountain stretch is pretty skinny, but has good elevation drop and nice pocket water. I did pretty well up there early the first morning. I parked, walked downstream for a bit, then hit the river and worked my way back up to the truck. The early morning allowed me to escape the heat and hit the breakfast bite.

I was mostly using a single dry fly (mayflies) on my Sage 3/4 weight center axis combo. It was a good time watching these hungry little brook trout rise from their deep little holes to hunt down my top water offering. Sometimes they completely whiffed but most of the time I was able to hook up and do a quick retrieve and release. I prolly hooked 30-40 of those little guys, with some up to 14″. I made it home by 2pm for a cocktail.  Winning.

The Beaver River starts back up to the west of town, out of The Minersville Reservoir. It runs through some private land, then onto public land for a few miles, and then skinnies out to irrigation again. With only a few miles of fishable river, only about a mile of it was riffled and fishable, with the rest being stagnant frog water.

It took me most of the first morning to learn the river sections noted above, but when I finally found the good area it was game on for the next day and a half.

It was small streamers and dropper nymphs that got em going. Even though grasshoppers and dragonflies were everywhere only the dinks would look up.

Most of these fish were good sized rainbows, with some smaller brookies mixed in. However, I did see a 40-50 lb Beaver swimming down river at me with a huge clump of flora for decorating his living room.

I should also mention I tried my luck up at Kent’s lake on my one man Water Master raft.   It was my first time getting this raft on the water.  I needed to test it out before floating a river, and I heard the lake has some good Tiger trout.    I trolled some streamers, tried indicator fishing some balanced leaches and damsel nymphs, and even tried a mayfly and cricket dry fly as the fish were hitting the top pretty good, and jumping completely out of the water.   I determined they were eating dragon flies that were hovering above water, but, of course, I dont carry them in my flybox (no more).

Here is my take:

• 0 fish landed, traditionally.
• 1 12″ screamed up from deep to grab my cricket as I was messing around with my gear.    After I stripped in all of my excess fly line, and got tight to the fly, my cricket arose from the deep a lonely bug.
•  1 fish landed by seeing a bobber swimming around, so I cast my flies to it, and reel in a bunch of line, a bobber, a swivel and 12″ rainbow who had a hood pretty deep in his gullet.   Instead of popping the hood, I cut the line at his mouth, as biologists say fish will dissolve that hook in no time and be good to go.   Frustrating tho…

I’m not much of a stillwater fisherman.  I’m OK with that.  Overall, it was a decent little visit to a small town.

Like all the bumper stickers, T-shirts and billboards in this town, I ❤ Beaver.

On to Diamond Fork for a few days.