Fly Fishing Central

Last week, myself and a select group of experienced fly anglers went live with a brand new fly fishing website entitled 'Fly Fishing Central'.  The concept of our website is to offer fresh new content updated weekly on all things fly fishing with articles, tips and tricks, step-by-step tying and much more. The site also features a new online forum that's already starting to see some pretty decent traffic.  Fly Fishing Central is targeting a global audience and will be looking for salt water and warm water specialist in the near future.  So whether you like fishing cutthroats on a stream, fat stillwater rainbows, monster pike, powerful blue fin tuna, acrobatic bass or tropical bone fish, you'll find something that peaks your interest there.  Come on by, take a look around, sign up on the forum then put your feet up and set a spell.  Fly Fishing Central.
To view my fist stillwater article on FFC entitled Working An Area and Observation, click here.

Pike Time

With the weather and the waters cooling plus the days getting shorter and the boatman / backswimmer action slowing down around these parts, that usually means pike time for me. The pike will be moving into the shallows so now is the time I start looking at trips out to Wabamun for some monster water wolves. Things have changed at Wabamun however with the closing of the power plant.  There won't be any more warm water coming into the lake but how this will effect the fishing has yet to be seen.  Wading the mouth of the outlet will be a lot colder on the feet for sure but I'm curious if the pike will congregate to this area in the numbers we're used to seeing.  You would think that they would make their way to the channel just out of habit but if the food sources aren't there like in the past they may get wise and move on.  Of course this area can't be any worse than any other shallow area of Wabamun so I would assume success can be found.  The question is just how successful will one be?  Are the cold days of the past with pike after pike on the end of your line over or will their instinct bring them into the area with the numbers we've gotten used to?  Only time and the willingness to investigate can answer that I guess.  We'll see how it goes over the next few weeks.

On Saturday I took a client out for a stillwater clinic to Muir Lake.  Although he did catch one nice 18 incher under an indicator on a sparkle leech, we didn't see any trout even bump the boatman or backswimmers he was fishing.  The surface action was almost non-existent and the bite never did really pick up near sunset like it usually does.  I'm almost certain the trout were tight to the bank, but thought it was more important to continue my clients casting into more open water than to have him constantly hooking up on weeds.  Unfortunately I can't upload any pics to my pc as my daughter seems to have misplaced the CDROM that came with my new camera.  Hope I find it soon.

Protection Of The Lakeshore Within The Town Of Wabamun

After 54 years of operation, this last March saw TransAlta shut down its last remaining generating unit. Their plan for next few years will be the demolition of the power plant and complete remediation and reclamation of the plant area including the wetland areas that were altered in the building of the plant back in 1956. TransAlta had built both a cold water intake channel from the lake to cool down it's generators and a warm water discharge channel to force the heated water back into the lake. Although, this reclamation would temporarily alter nesting grounds and spawning habitat, it would soon be wildlife friendly with birds and fish returning to this valuable area.  Sounds pretty good heh?  Well, it does until you hear what the town of Wabamun wants to do with it after TransAlta is done.

The town council is asking the Alberta Government for approval for development south of the CN rail-tracks.  This area is currently where the warm water discharge channel sits and is an important nesting area for birds and spawning fish.  The wetlands has no strong foundation for development meaning this marshy area would need excessive gravel fill to make it suitable to build on.  According to the plans that are availble here (Discovery Wharf) the intake and outflow channels would be left behind and altered with shops, restaurants, homes, a wharf, etc, being built on the edge of them.  All of the shoreline east of the channels would be filled in and developed north to the train tracks for housing, shops and a beach.  These are huge nesting areas and massive spawning habitat to be lost.  If you want to help at the very least, sign the petition here. http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/protection-of-the-lakeshore-within-in-the-town-of-wabamun.html.

To view this area, check out this video. The beginning of the video is the current boat launch and dock and that's where they want to build the new marina.  The remainder of the video is exactly where they want the development to take place of the new wharf, all the land as far north as the plant you see and east back to the current dock would then be lost to development.

Website Updates

2010 has been AlbertaStillwaters.Com's busiest season yet.  This fall has seen many people become a part of the Alberta fly fishers fraternity through my one-on-one fly fishing clinics and the reviews have been overwhelming.  Even with that though, we didn't have any clients booked for this weekend so I thought we should concentrate our efforts on some much needed website updates.  As you can see on the right hand side of my blog, we now have an advertising section for sponsors of our web sites.  If you're interested in advertising with us, we'll give you exposure from our three main sites (AlbertaStillwaters, Doc's Blog & Fly Fishing Edmonton) all for the price of what one site would cost you.  As well, when available, we'll be removing the current ads off the Alberta Fly Fishing Forum and adding our own ads giving you another avenue to reach thousands more fly anglers.

The updates to the Fly Fishing Edmonton site consist of adding google map to all the listed lakes making finding a local fishery even easier.  As well we've added Millers Lake to the list which we've been meaning to do for quite some time.

Also recently added to AlbertaStillwaters.Com, a new page featuring beginner fly casting lessons.  Starting in 2011, we'll now be offering hourly casting lessons starting at $50.00 per hour available to kids 10 years of age and up and adults of any age.

If there is something you would like to see on one of our websites feel free to drop me an email at mike@albertastillwaters.com.  I'll give consideration to all requests.