Friday, July 22, 2011

Long Hot Summer

The month of July has been a long hot month here in the desert. I have not spent much time blogging either. Work hours have changed and I have been adapting to a new schedule, hopefully things will settle down now. During the month of July I have managed to escape to the rim country a few times. Much of the Tonto forest section of the rim is currently closed for fire hazard, a rough year for Arizona. I was forced to explore some new country, so I went with a friend and visited East Clear Creek and tossed some flies. Followed the next day by some fishing at Blue Ridge Reservoir. Did not catch a lot of fish that trip and took even less photos. That is a lesson for blogging learned, caught two nice fish in the first 15 minutes and that there would be plenty of photo ops, but that was pretty much it for the day.

East Clear Creek
Blue Ridge Blue Gill
 
 

The Blue

Two weeks later took my kids back up to East Clear Creek to camp and fish. Watched my 16 year old son land his first redside on a dry fly, thanks to the mini-hopper an Arizona must have dry. My daughter also landed a nice fish which got away as we prepared to take a picture. The twins did their best to dent the crawdad population that is out of control on the creek. That evening we were able to see the forest get a lot of much needed rain, about 7 hours worth. As we packed up and left that evening the lighting put on a show the whole 2 hour drive home.

Dry flies in the morning

Storm cloud seeds


Crawdad Kings

Now that August is approaching, we start in to my favorite time of year. Just got a new fall catalog to remind me of all the gear I need. Days will shorten and the morning temps will dip back into the 70's. Bird hunting can then only be right around the corner. Time to prepare for a great fall of hunting, fly fishing, and biking.

No comments:

Post a Comment