It felt good to wake up here in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. I’m here for the World Masters Fly Fishing Championships that begins September 24th. I’m early with my teammates Pete Erickson, Bret Bishop, Mike Sexton and Loren Williams to practice. We have one thing in mind – defend the Championship Title we won last year in Italy.
We’re off to a good start as far as doing our homework. At every Worlds we have a guide/host. Here we have legendary lake fly fisher Brian Chan. Brian has decades of on-water experience chasing trout on stillwaters and is one the world’s foremost experts. This is critical to us because it so happens that this year’s tournament has three lake sessions that Brian will be able to advise us about.
When we all arrived yesterday we were excited and anxious to hit the water early first thing this morning but the forecast wasn’t good and it lived up to itself. At exactly 5:30 am I heard a roar of wind knock things off the porch of our Airbnb. Minutes later came heavy rain. It was horrible so we opted to snag a fantastic sit down breakfast at the Amsterdam then do errands and unpack.
While chowing breakfast Brian called to tell us the storm would be over late morning and suggested we meet at noon and try to get at least a half a day on nearby Morgan Lake. We all loved that idea and we arrived to nearly perfect weather conditions around 2 PM.
I admit I’ve been craving some “lake” fishing for trout. When I lived in Idaho I mixed my river fishing with stillwaters for trout. Most anglers don’t get excited to fish lakes and therefore lakes were great ways to escape the crowds on rivers. Lakes often have larger fish as well. Today I fished my 9’ 6-weight with my Scientific Anglers Stillwater Line. Normally I would fish a long leader with three flies but here in BC you are only allowed one fly at a time so I had a level piece of 9 feet of 0X Fluoro.
I got in the boat with Brian and Loren. Bret, Mike and Pete were in Brian’s spare boat. Brian has quite the rig where he tows his main boat on the trailer and the extra boat rides the roof. He has a pully-machine thing that takes the boat on and off the roof. Pretty cool!
Fishing was amazing. First of all, its great to be in the boat with Brian and Loren because they are generous with their amazing lake fly selections. Loren fixed me up with a water boatman and I caught fish on that immediately as did he. Then Brian had me fish a Gomphus which is a dragon fly nymph. You fish it slow and at first it seems unlikely a fish would bite. But then you get the grab from a large rainbow and it’s on.
While most anglers are familiar that there are many different subspecies of cutthroat trout, most are not aware there are different strains of rainbows as well. Today we caught Blackwater and Fraser Valley rainbows. This one here is the Fraser Valley.
Fishing this afternoon was excellent for all of us. While we’re all good on lakes, we can see already Brian will tune us in to a lot of little tricks, particularly for the trout of this area. Today was a ton of fun.
We just finished a big meal downtown. Kamloops is a hopping little city and we were lucky to find a place with room for eating. Now its time for a good sleep and we’ll head to practice on another lake in the morning.
Go get em fellas!