My boyfriend, Dylan Mendoza, guides out of Colorado during the Summer months. I drove up with him away from the Texas heat to get him moved back in and spend some time fishing his “home away from home” waters.
All the rivers were running high and looked like chocolate milk besides a tributary of the Roaring Fork, so we stuck to it and had loads of fun sight casting to all different sized browns and rainbows. After getting squeezed out of our spot from surrounding anglers inching in towards our honey hole stretch, we decided to cross the river and head downstream a bit. On our walk down we saw plenty of fish, but Dylan waved me over and pointed to a toad of a rainbow. He was sitting in about 2 feet of water, tops, his size and unique coloring clear as day, about 3 feet off the bank.
Dylan told me to get him, so I stripped some line out and got after it. My first drift was sloppy so I re-casted and sure enough, that next drift, we both watched his body slightly move and his big ol’ mouth open to eat our size 24 midge.
He put up a pretty good fight, took us on a couple good runs, and we laughed through the whole process of getting him to the net. We snapped a couple iPhone grip and grin pictures then let the beast be on his way. Followed by smiles and high fives, we both looked at one another and said that was a pretty good note to end the day with. So we packed up and headed back to the cabin where we reminisced about our day over an ice cold beer.
