Utah Safari Pt 3 – Current Creek

After a full day of hiking and fishing on Nameless Spring Creek, we drove back into Vernal, and ate a quick meal in a restaurant.  yeah…we wimped out on the camp dinner, but we knew that we still had about 2.5 hours to drive to our next camping spot and our excuse was that we did not want to be prepping and eating dinner at 10PM.

We figured that it would be difficult to find a free and available camping spot where we were heading.  We got lucky in that as we drove up the dirt road, we found one spot in an area all alone from the crowds, above a section of river that we were going to fish the next morning…perfect!  it did rain a bit that night, but nothing that was going to cloud up the water.  All was good.

At this point we were back in known territory for me.  I have had the pleasure of fishing Current Creek the previous year and I really liked this little creek.  Technically, the Current is a tail-water, but it fishes more like a meadow stream with all the beaver dams.  The fish are very pretty and range from small to beastly.  Your average size fish is about 12″, but you have the potential to catch “a ton” of fish in the course of the days fishing.

We started the morning by basically jumping into the river right below camp and working our way upstream.  Jay was into a fish pretty quick.  It looked like it would be hoppers and stimies as the bugs of the day.  I was running pretty slow as I still felt sore from the previous two days of hiking and fishing.  Jay, on the other hand was on fire.  He was into five or six fish before I even caught my first of the day.  We worked out way upstream and finally came to a deep hole that had plenty of fish rising to small PMD’s.  It was either snip off the hopppers, or move on.  Jay decided to move upstream, I wanted to work the rising fish.  Several small fish later, I rejoined Jay upstream and we continued to fish our way up towards the dam.

A quick lunch and then we drive down to my favorite section of this creek.  We do not see any other cars or fishermen, so we take that as a good sign.  We start the work the next section and I do a complete end-over-end tumble into the water up to my armpits.  Argh…

But that proves to be the only mishap.  At this point in the trip, we are completely comfortable fishing with each other and we quickly drop into the routine of leap frogging each other for holes.  We start to pick off fish pretty much in every likely spot and wind up doing really well throughout this section.  I had several hookups were the fish would fight for a brief moment and then take you into the bushes and bank-side brush.  Hmm….have these fish been caught before?

We finish up this section and decide to call it a day.  The most memorable part of the day is Jay explaining that he picked a nice large brown out of this one bank slot, and casts to that spot to show where, and a brown shot out of the slot to take his fly.  I guess a good lie is a good lie and if one pick one fish out, another will move in and take up residence.

We finish the day, pack up, and head back to Salt Lake City.  This section concludes my time with Jay, but I still have a few more parts to the story where I am exploring on my own.