i love this place!! big biggies beggin for bugs! caught about 15 large trout(20 + in) on ants and trico spinners. these fish are fighters!! saw a water snake met its fate with one of those big bastards! he put up a good fight though, the bow hit him about 5 times b4 he ate it! what a place!! In most cases i could watch the fish swim right up to my flies and take them.
I spent a day up there back in June, it's quite a place and worth the effort, I'd recommend it to anyone. I did have a much tougher time up there though, I only caught about 12 fish, 3-5 of them in the 18" range, one was about 22" (calibrated against my net), and the rest were smaller, all the way down to about 5", and lost quite a few 18" fish as well. I also caught one SALMON that was about 10-11". Apparently a few salmon frye made it through the spring that passes from the ponds to the river under the quarry rubble and thrived on all the bug life in the ponds. Will be interesting to see what happens to them. The salmon are very clearly different, they're skinnier and their eyes look way to big for their head. You would think that it was an under-nourished trout if it weren't for all the fat football shaped rainbows that fill the ponds, that plus the fish had no shortage of energy. Apparently a few of them have been caught so far this year.
It was a pretty hot day when I was there and I had to work very hard for each and every fish, as soon as you found one thing that worked they'd stop hitting it within 20 minutes and you had to start the search all over again. The place was like a fly fishing laboratory, you could see many large fish swimming around and see their response to your presentations. A couple things to consider if you go, got started early but no where near early enough, plan on being the water at sunrise otherwise you'll miss some real quality time. The mid day really slowed down, you could watch as the fish stopped cruising and by around 1-2:00 they would just kind of deaddrift around. They'd still hit but everything had to be perfect and you had to be real patient, terrestrial looking thingies on the windward side of the pond worked, but it was very slow going. You wouldn't miss much by taking off for a few hours and getting some lunch somewhere and coming back fresh for the evening show.
Still, this place is a mind bender, I was working two fish at one point and unfortunatley the little guy took the fly, in the water it looked like about a 12" fish or so but once he was on and I got him in I realized it was a nice 18 incher, it's just that the other fish was so stupid big that it threw my sense of proportion totally off. Some of the ponds are very small, maybe around an acre or so, but still have a surprising number of very large trout.
I'm not the best fly fisherman but I imagine someone who was really on their game could have a field day here, and if you were to hit this place when it is "on" it would put your hair on fire. There was a huge difference between the 22 incher and the 18 inchers, it took me about 10-15 minutes to get in the big guy and I was trying as hard as I could NOT to overplay him, but he just kept running and running, then sitting on the bottom, then running again, then sitting, and on and on. I had lost 3 big fish already earlier that week and was avoiding all the stupid mistakes I had made (line control, checking the knots, and always being ready for the run). I couldn't imagine what it would be like to get into a whole bunch of those big guys in one day.
