Deckers in the Winter

Winter on the South Platte below Cheesman Canyon.

     I've now listened to Clint Packo, Freestone Outfitters, twice within a couple months on the topic of cold weather fishing. He wants us to fish small and slow. Randall and Terry are joining me on Thursday to try out his techniques. 

     Freestone Outfitters stream report for the recent cold weather excursions has mention miracle midges every time. So I tied up seven. Carefully strung them on my threader. And now there are six. Size 22 flies have the ability to come to life like pinocchio when ever they detect that they are free. To keep one from springing to life after it is tied, I thread it onto a piece of 3x as show above. But to get it onto a tippet on the stream it just does not work to put them in a plastic fly shop cup. The fly shop's love these cups for small flies. A size 22 midge can escape from this box before you are out the door. So my method is to carefully slide them off the 3x and onto my work surface very very slowly. Then, one at a time I carefully thread them on to my CF Design threader. The threader fits in a foam cutout in the CF fly box. Once out on the stream, I can open the fly box without dumping the the contents into the ice water, and the larger threader is easier to manipulate with cold hands than trying to extract a single size 22 fly from  a foam pad next two a dozen identical flies. The downside is that it is very easy to drop the whole threader into the ice water. That happened once, on the South Platte, in winter, fishing with Terry. Certainly it won't happen again.

     But somehow before I had them all strung, one red one managed to escape. I know it will reappear in a painful place. They always do.