A Fly In The Forum Ointment

If you're here looking for information about either The Fishin' Alberta Message Board or the Alberta Fly Fishing Forum, it is not your PC. Stebb's entire site is down including their own forum (which is how I get customer support). Therefore, I can't even tell you what the problem is never mind how long it will be until my two forums are online again. Just have patience and hopefully it won't be to long.

July 31/08 *NOTE: The forums are back up. Enjoy :)

While you're here though, you may as well read my latest fishing report.

I headed out to Muir Lake Monday night with Phil Rowley and his youngest son Shaun. We got on the lake at about 5:30pm and the water was really warm about 72F-74F. We figured the trout would be a lot more comfortable sitting deep so we made out way over to the deep hole south-east of the island. We parked our boats in 11ft of water casting out to 14ft and Phil had one on right away with a leech pattern. He did well with the leech for the rest of the night but I didn't fair as well on my bloodworms, scuds and chironomids. I did hook into a pig not long after Phil's 1st trout but it wrapped himself around Phil's anchor rope and broke me off. Not sure if it took the scud or the Redd October but that sort of set the course for the rest of my night. Phil kept hooking up consistently with most taking the leech pattern and I not so consistent. It seemed every time I did hook up, I'd loose 'em. Not entirely sure how many Phil got to the net but after I changed over to a baby beadhead bugger, I did manage one stocker, one decent female and one big male. I forgot my measure-net in the van so I couldn't tape them but I'd say the male was pushing 21-22 inches. Phil's got the pics so maybe after he reads this he'll e-mail 'em to me and I can put them up. There were frequent aggressive risers throughout the evening but we weren't sure what exactly they were rising for. We saw spent mayflies but not an abundance of them and some very small midges. I also saw what looked like stickleback minnows swirling for the small midges so it's possible the trout were rising for these. The trout I did manage to bring to the boat had severe parasites under their skin. I've seen this in the past on most of our local lakes when the water gets very warm but never this bad. These parasites are very similar to the parasites that cause swimmer-itch. We got off the water at about 10pm. All things considered, it was a great time with good company even with my case of the Ralphy's. (Ralphy- A word created by Don Anderson used to describe a fish getting off your hook after being hooked. Ralph refers to ex Alberta Premiere Ralph Klein who made it illegal to use barbed hooks even though there is no science to support that barbless hooks cause less mortality in fish.)