Granby – For Colorado ice anglers still shivering from a season of cold, snow and wind, you know it’s going to be a good outing when the first item on the list of essentials is sunscreen.
At some point, it almost doesn’t matter whether the fish will bite or not. Just sitting out with a few friends under a warm, full sun seems almost enough. But wait, there’s more.
The second indication that things might be going really well came when Bernie Keefe backed off the throttle of his snowmobile and began tossing augers, rods and containers onto the ice.
“This looks like the spot,” he said of a blank place somewhere in the middle of Granby Reservoir.
Earlier, Keefe had tried to hedge his bet, delivering a pessimistic report that might have been tied to an almost-
full moon, the alignment of the planets or the fact that fish under cover sometimes grow lethargic toward season’s end.
“I called around last night and nobody caught anything yesterday,” he tried to dampen his companions’ eager expectations.
“I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high.”
But there was this twinkle in Keefe’s eye as he began to drill through 2 feet of solid ice with a wedding-cake frosting of snow on top. Considering the veteran lake trout guide knows the contour of the state’s second-largest cold-water reservoir like the roof of his mouth, nobody seemed to be worried.
“This is an area I haven’t fished yet this year,” Keefe said. By the looks of the ice, nobody else had either.
Keefe, who can be reached at 970-531-2318, believes Granby lake trout wander widely, particularly during spawning, less so during winter. The days he doesn’t catch fish on his home lake are far outnumbered by the ones when he catches a whole lot.
The results in between might be a disappointment to him, but hardly anyone else.
It took all of five minutes for Lakewood resident Matt Massey to miss a bite, another couple to welcome an 18-inch lake trout into the sunshine. So much for a slow bite.
On his first day all season fishing outside a hut, Keefe chose a white Fuzzy Grub on a 3/8-ounce jig head, heavy enough to bounce bottom in water that might range from 30 to 50 feet deep. As sweeteners, he added a strip of sucker meat, topped with a red egg. Not to be outdone, Massey applied a liberal squirt of Berkley liquid PowerBait.
These enticements produced more than a dozen nice fish ranging from 17-20 inches and twice that many misses. That the catch contained no really big fish worried him less than the fact that there were no small ones.
“We almost never see anything under 15 inches,” Keefe said of a puzzle that might bode ill for the future.
Jake Bennett, retired Division of Wildlife biologist who lives 10 minutes from the big lake, believes the absence of small fish can be traced to poor forage conditions four years ago, when adults were too thin to pull off an adequate spawn.
“My friends and I caught more than 700 lake trout last year,” Bennett said. “Only one was less than 15 inches.”
Whether this translates to a sharp decline in numbers of mature lake trout in subsequent years remains to be seen. Meanwhile, you’ll probably find the most fish directly beneath Keefe’s hole in the ice. Sunshine is optional.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
