Pueblo
Running lights twinkling in the darkness, a fishing boat, then another and another eased out of the marina toward some unseen rendezvous with excitement.
Driven by the anticipation of a prime wiper bite, the dawn patrol had arrived at Pueblo Reservoir. Big wipers, heck, almost any size wipers, have a way of making normally sane people do strange things.
“Meet me at the dock at 4:30,” Kevin Treanor said, voice coming through the phone line loud and all too clear.
The mathematically challenged Denver resident on the other end didn’t need a calculator to know that his alarm clock setting had suddenly shrunk to very small numbers.
Clearly, this was a time best suited for insomnia, milk delivery and wiper fishing.
Treanor knows the drill better than most. On a morning in March two years ago, he netted a wiper from the lake’s Peck Creek arm that weighed 26 pounds, 15 ounces. It was the largest specimen ever in Colorado for this hybrid of the white bass and striped bass, missing the world all-tackle record by just 6 ounces.
Remarkably, the Pueblo native caught his prize on a fly rod, and it remains the International Game Fish Association fly record by a large margin.
A great majority of the anglers who pursue wiper at Pueblo and several dozen other eastern Colorado reservoirs do so with a variety of spinning gear – either trolling or casting various lures or, for members of the dawn patrol, working plugs on the surface. Treanor takes the rod less traveled.
“I think using a fly gives me a real advantage,” Treanor said of a tactic that typically features a popper of his own design.
For those zealots willing to punch the clock, the drill goes something like this: Stake out a likely location and wait for the fish to appear – sometimes in a frenzied feeding boil, mostly in random rises.
In every case, the dinner bell rings for the lake’s ample banquet of gizzard shad. During low light, this bait migrates close to the surface, bringing predators up to meet it. As the sun grows, the shad, and wiper, go down.
“It’s usually over by 7 a.m.,” said Treanor, who visits the reservoir about 100 mornings a year, returning to his home at Pueblo West, about five minutes away, in time to shower for his work with a telecommunications firm.
But the thing that most drives these early-morning junkies is the peculiar delight of casting to surface fish, the thrill of watching a large mouth open to swallow a fly or lure. That and following the birds.
“I like to watch the gulls. They tell me where the fish are working,” Treanor said, aiming his boat toward a distant point where birds dove for baitfish driven to the surface by hungry wipers.
In between these episodes, the strategy is to cast randomly in hopes that the surface commotion from a popper will attract a cruising fish. With the sun peeking over the horizon, a fly disappeared in a sudden swirl. A splash, then a dive and a typical bout with Colorado’s strongest warm-water fish was engaged.
By Pueblo, and Treanor, standards, the fish wasn’t a big one, just 6 1/2 pounds. But it put a deep bend into a stiff 8-weight rod and kept it there for what seemed a very long time.
Later, a 4-pound rainbow trout, another of Pueblo’s grand success stories, took a surface popper. When the sun chased the wiper down, Treanor turned to the other elements in what he calls his Pueblo fly rod slam. Both smallmouth and largemouth bass were located quickly; only the recalcitrant carp broke the cycle.
Treanor’s enthusiasm for Pueblo Reservoir wasn’t always so complete. Working happily in the Steamboat Springs area as a trout guide, he received a summons to return to his home city to handle family affairs.
“I thought I was doomed,” he said, remembering that time a dozen years ago.
But he bought a boat, wore it out, and then bought another, now working occasionally as a lake guide through Pueblo’s ArkAnglers shop. The rest, as they say, is fishing history. Pueblo wipers will keep you awake nights just thinking about it.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
