Hartsel – On an uncommonly warm day in late October, Alan Deines thought about ice.
“I remember pulling a lure off the edge of the ice and a fish would grab it almost every time,” the Denver resident reflected on a condition when Colorado’s most prolific trout lake moves into its shutdown phase.
To fashion such ruminations, Deines first had to ignore the sight spread immediately before him. In these magic moments before sunrise, large rainbow trout cruised purposefully through that thin margin of water separating a weed bed from the surface.
Dorsal fins punctured the surface like marauding sharks and, for anglers tingling with expectation, the excitement seemed much the same. A bulge here. A swirl there. Little wonder Spinney Mountain Reservoir causes so much lament as it approaches a winter of hibernation.
Depending on weather, Colorado State Parks usually shuts the gate at Spinney for the winter toward the third week in November, the only major fishing lake in the state with an opening and closing date.
Deines launches his boat at Spinney an estimated 20 times a year, mostly in spring and autumn. Although he occasionally fishes with flies, his is the scheme of a man who lives to catch larger fish by casting lures. Deines mostly throws Kastmasters in various weights and colors, occasionally a Panther Martin with a silver blade and yellow body, lots of spoons.
“I like hammered gold and since I’m usually fighting the wind, heavier lures work best,” said Deines, whose strategy suits those periods when trout don’t have their attention fixed on the midges, mayflies and caddis of late spring and summer.
Autumn is best, Deines said, because that’s when he gets the biggest fish. It’s also the time just before the curtain closes, when the trepidation of a long winter with the boat in mothballs brings a keen urgency to his fishing enterprise.
On a day when the temperature pushed past the mid- 50s beneath cotton-ball clouds and barely a hint of a breeze, images of winter seemed far away. To the contrary, Spinney’s famous rafts of aquatic vegetation – millfoil, eledea and coontail – remain generally undiminished.
With these continuing effects of a mild autumn, Division of Wildlife biologist Jeff Spohn will delay his annual stocking of rainbows for a time. Spohn’s strategy for stocking some 45,000 12-inch fish is fashioned around water temperature, the colder the better.
His notion is to wait until the metabolism of predatory pike declines with the thermometer, thus saving as many of his babies as possible.
Now in its fifth year, this game plan for sneaking larger stockers past the pike teeth continues to bring Spinney back from the doldrums of a half-decade ago.
“Compared to 2000 and 2001, it’s recovering by leaps and bounds,” Spohn allowed.
Spohn’s net surveys show a slight increase in trout numbers from a year ago, although size appears to have declined. Relative body weight remains high, but anglers generally aren’t catching as many in that magic 20-inch-plus range.
The continuing crusade against northern pike may have reached something of a standstill, in part because anglers may be removing fewer.
“We’ve got a ton of pike from 8 to 24 inches that are surviving largely on crayfish and are in very poor condition,” Spohn said. “Everyone is catching them because they’re hungry.”
Larger pike, 3-footers that actually can eat the 12-inch stockers, are much harder to tempt.
“We don’t have as many as there used to be, but still more than I’d like,” said Spohn, who encourages anglers to keep their pike catch.
Meanwhile, Spinney trout continue their comeback.
In the early minutes before sunrise, trout fed purposefully around these weedbeds for scuds, snails and whatever insects remained. Deines’ Kastmaster quickly attracted a number of rainbows that showed more spunk than size. Larger fish spooked as the fish drifted over the weeds.
Activity slowed dramatically as the sun’s rays penetrated the water. By late morning, it became apparent that most trout had burrowed into the weeds and zipped the cover shut.
This behavior seemed more appropriate for August than October. No matter what the calendar might say, ice seemed far, far away.
Listen to Charlie Meyers at 9 a.m. each Saturday on “The Fan Outdoors” on KKFN 950 AM. He can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
