Report March 11, 2025
March 2025 is proving to be a lot like March 2024 as far as the fishing at Lees Ferry. In a word, it is tough. Most fish are still holding in slow deep areas such as eddies, especially in the zone where the water starts to break out of the eddy and head downstream. These areas are deep and very difficult to fish. Think lower part of Long Bar about halfway to Ferry Swale Camp, the eddy at Nine Mile Camp or the slow tanky water below 4 Mile Bar riffle. Nymphing has been a bust for me, so I’ve turned to fishing black, green or brown Woolly Buggers on a 200 grain 24′ sink tip line with a very short (3-4 foot) leader. We are at the front edge of the spawn and there are a few staging fish holding at the bottom of the trough at 4 Mile Bar. Fish should start moving into the gravel soon. The last few years the spawn has not been robust, but with overall fish numbers down and condition factor up, we can reasonably hope for a decent spawn this year. This activity normally peaks around mid-to late April.
Report: January 16, 2025
Happy New Year! First day on the river in 2025 and it was about like you would expect it to be at Lees Ferry in January: cold, quiet and tough fishing. Upside is we had the river completely to ourselves. The name of the game was throwing buggers both wading and from a drifting boat with sink tip lines. The half dozen fish we hooked were all healthy and in the 14-16 inch range. A beautiful day and a reminder that fishing isn’t always about numbers.
2024 Year End Summary:
The 2024 season was, in a word, challenging. As March began, anglers got the sense
that something was wrong. By March we should have been seeing fish move into deep
and shallow water spawning areas, but we did not. Fishing was also not picking up as
is typical and the most successful anglers were fishing from a drifting boat in order to
catch just a few fish. Then the Arizona Game and Fish electrofishing data came in.
Indications were that between October 2023 and the spring of 2024 the population had
declined around 30%. The warmer than normal releases and low dissolved oxygen
from Glen Canyon Dam in the summers of 2022 and 2023 had finally caught up with the
fishery. The mechanics were simple enough. When water temperatures increase, so
does the metabolic demand of rainbow trout. They have to eat more. However warmer
water does not translate into more available food, that stays the same. The fish were
simply not able to put on the weight, achieve the condition factor, that would allow them
to get through the tough winter months and they died.
However, as the summer progressed, anglers figured out how to catch fish. Again and
again and again they figured out how to catch fish. It seemed that everything you
figured out, a technique or an area to fish, would work for a few days or a week, then
crickets. Adaptability was the name of the game all summer and occasionally a good
day was had, approaching or even exceeding the Arizona Game and Fish goal for the
river of one fish per angler hour. But there were a lot of tough days out there. The fish
that were caught began to look in good shape. This was great to see for obvious
reasons, but also because it could be a harbinger of a decent spawn in March-May,
something that we sorely need.
There are a couple other significant outcomes for the season. In mid-summer the
Bureau of Reclamation began releasing water through the bypass or jet tubes to cool
the river below the dam. Note that this was NOT done to protect the trout fishery from
another summer of warm flows . These flows were implemented to disadvantage small
mouth bass in the river below the dam and prevent them from spawning and potentially
impacting Humpback chub in Grand Canyon. This has never been done before and
these flows greatly increased dissolved oxygen, cooled the river significantly and
increased nutrient levels in the river.. Now we just have to convince all the players that
these types of flows should be considered when the trout fishery is threatened by warm
releases or low dissolved oxygen.
Secondly the decline in the fishery spurred the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive
Management Program’s Technical Work Group to form an ad hoc group to investigate
ideas to help the trout fishery recover. I believe this was a result of anglers attending
and participating in the public comment portion of the TWG meetings. At this point, this
is really our only forum, but it does appear to get attention. Updates on the management
of the fishery will be posted here or sign up for updates by emailing
leesferryconcernedanglers @gmail.com
Most guides, myself included, are done for the year. Time to chase deer and elk and
doves and ducks. Keep Lee’s Ferry in your thoughts and prayers. As significant
changes become evident in the cold water fisheries of the West, the importance of
tailwater fisheries where we can have some control over water quality, is more evident
than ever.