I as very lucky to tag along with some friends to Kay Fly fishing lodge in Punta Allen. We had about as bad of a week of weather as you can get but we still had a blast. We flew into Cancun spent the night then drove four hours south to the giant national park. There at the entrance of the national park we got extorted for about 60 bucks even though we had the appropriate passes. After arguing with Juan we gave him 60 bucks told him to fuck off and we were on our way. A few more miles down the bumpy national park to road I realized that I was on Mexico’s version of the road to the miracle mile. It was a pot holed nightmare just like the one in my backyard. We eventually got to a small dock in the mangroves where we waited for our hour and half boat ride to Punta Allen. Lily the owner of Kay Fly was casting a ten weight with her 10 year old son on the dock when we pulled up. We basically got a grand tour of Allen on our short ride to the lodge. Before you even arrive you can tell you’rein the right spot for saltwater fly fishing.
Fucking things are hard to catch
Unfortunately due to the weather, we really only ended up getting our first day to do serious permit fishing. Fortunately coach Steve and I both landed one on our first day. The rest of the week had crazy 30 mph plus wind and cloudy rainy skies. We spent it catching bonefish, snook, and barracuda. I caught at least 60 bonefish in a week and that wasn’t even our focus. Our primary goal of the trip was to try to catch a permit on a floating crab or shrimp. It has become a major focus of anglers fishing Ascension Bay. There isn’t a go to rag head or Merkin pattern that has been developed for it though. It’s anybodies guess. So the day we had to hang at the lodge due to high winds, I had a lot of fun with my good buddy Nick from Westbank Anglers tying up what we thought would work. Unfortunately we didn’t truly get to try them out. But catching lots of bonefish and snook wasn’t exactly a bad time. The guides knew where to get out of the wind and work with the shitty conditions. We still had an awesome time. My favorite part of the trip was asking our guide Tino “how deep is it here?”. All guides hate this constantly asked question and I spent a good hour with our guide Tino laughing about it. I had such an amazing time relating to the guides at Kay Fly.
Coach Steve with his first permit and holy shit it was a good one
It really showed me that guides are the same everywhere. After everyday the guides had their round table to sit around, smoke, drink and laugh at stupid shit just like we do in Wyoming. It was just as fun laughing about guiding with the guides around the round table as being out on the boat fishing with them. I’m happy that I’m almost 40 and can look back at all my bad decisions and feel so good about all of them. I love being a guide and getting to hang out with the guides at Kay Fly made me realize how lucky I am to be a guide.
I really can’t recommend Kay Fly enough. The lodge is very cozy, food is great, and the guides are amazing. Ascension bay is very special place and Kay Fly is the perfect way to experience it.
The Spey fishing has been great lately
Before I get into the annual review I’d like to do a quick update on current fishing in Alcova. The weather has been terrible. It’s been 60 degreees most days but the wind has been easily over 30 mph almost all of December. The fishing is good though. I’ve been mostly going out for hour and a half long Spey/swing sessions and the fish were grabbing a swung brown pine squirrel leech pretty dang good. I just use a Sage Method 5 weight with a 225 grain OPST head with a 10 foot MOW tip (5 feet of floating and 5 feet of T8). If I had to pick one MOW tip or really any tip/versileader it would be that one. It just works everywhere. I also like using a single hand rod more because it’s less rod to ice up when it does get cold. Another one of my favorite ways to fish is using a heavy jig fly, usually some form of a leech or bugger and just jig the bottom of the river. That can work shockingly well some days. I’m not exaggerating when I say you can catch more jigging then just a regular dead drift with a nymph set up. The mile has some nice big browns in it but they are still spawning so most of us usually leave that alone. I did spend a day up in the canyon though and it is pretty easy to catch bright fish if your a gentlemen or lady about it and stay off the beds. There are ALOT of rainbows up there too. Now when it comes to the reef I don’t think too many people have been floating the reef, I can’t emphasize how almost all of December has been horrible with the wind. I’m sure it’s fishing well, and remember you really want to be fishing from 11 till 230, that will probably be the best bite. I personally am focused on either jigging with a 6 weight or just wade fishing and casting my Spey set up. The nymphing can be good but it’s not how I would try to catch them right now.
Remember to be careful where you fish on the mile and stay off the reds. The mile browns spawn all the way into January.
Ok end of year review time!
Another year rolls by and we’re here at Christmas. It was a great year here but I do have to say it was the year of little fish. We have be seeing the success of Wyoming Game and Fish’s exhaustive stocking efforts. The river is absolutely loaded with fish. Andh boy did the little fish make themselves known. It proved to be a bit of a downside this year though. Basically a lot of the days it was tough to not catch 50 little fish. They were everywhere. There was no secret rig or food source that would just magically catch just the bigger older fish, you really just had to fish hard and catch what you’re gonna catch. However, we did rely on a big crane fly we call the pickle, which is basically Charlie cravens olive crane fly nymph. Seth was fishing that as a big aquatic moth larvae, honestly I forget what that moth is called but when Seth says anything we treat it as the gospel. So we fished the hell outta that thing. The good old thin mint was good for bigger guy too as usual. And every year we basically have to figure out what color or crayfish patterns is gonna be the one. This year an orange and tan zurdle was the heismann. The green back orange belly zurdle worked wonders in June but as the summer stretched on the orange and tan pattern proved to be top dog. I did have a couple of good days on the closer crayfish under a bobber floating closer to Casper but the zurdle was usually the winner. So that’s what most of us were doing to try to target bigger fish. They worked well for varsity but it was still a battle against JV fish every day. The biologist here say that grey reef fish usually grow 3 inches a year here so we are all pretty excited for the next few years. All in and all, these stocking efforts should result in some awesome fishing and get our fish numbers back up above 4,000 fish per mile.
2025 was a fun year
2025 was the year of the perdigon. I have never seen everybody use them like they did this year. 10 plus years ago when I guided in Montana all we did was fish tungsten headed droppers. The word perdigon would get thrown around occasionally but it was really just Duracell and frenchie variations everyone who knew what was up was fishing. Eventually you started hearing “Duracell”, and “frenchie” being mentioned in every fly shop across the country. I remember fishing one of Jake Wallbridges patterns 15 years ago that he called the chubby chaser. I religiously used it around the Bozeman area. It was basically a Duracell with a marabou tail, but man oh man did we think we could solve all the world’s problems with that fly. He was an amazingly creative and hungry fishing guide from Michigan that I learned a lot from. He really elevated my confidence in heavy ass nymphs that 100% increased my fishiness. As much of a secret as we acted like these flies were, in reality they were really just tungsten headed nymphs. If you ever want the best guide in Montana, call up Montana Troutfitters in Bozeman and ask for “ Wally”. Today every tom dick and harry knows what a Frenchie is. I actually worked for Betsy French when I guided in Montana, and I’m pretty sure her husband not lance egan actually invented the Frenchie. But I really don’t know. But we all had a huge takeaway this year. Weighted flies can work wonders. It actually turned into a crutch for everyone. The Platte has always been a split shot river. But this year everyone was seeing the benefits of nymphing weighted flies in addition to split shot. Black and purple were the two colors. We religiously fished them this year. The olive Spanish bullet saw some good days too but it was mostly the black and purple that really fired. I will be tying at least a hundred of each this winter.
Fremont fished great.
Fremont fished great this year. Nothing particularly noteworthy or different happened that I saw but it fished well. I did see a monster 10 lbs fish in the canyon this year. I’m pretty sure we caught every fish in the hole except him. Every time we’d get a drift towards him a 17 incher would get in the way. Eventually he got annoyed and disappeared. Goes to show there are still monsters in there.
The most wild thing of 2025 was the naked chick who was camping at chalkbluff for a little over a week. Everyday you’d see her walking around butt ass naked. She’d even come down to the river and say hello. Crazy Daisey. That was something else.
We did have good hatches of all our old reliables. PMD’s, yellow sallies, baetis, caddis and Trico’s all gave us good steady nymphing May through September. June and July were really consistent, with great streamer fishing. I really enjoyed August this year. August everywhere across the Rockies can be a frustrating month. High water temps, slow or no bug activity, and the fish are not eating much. But for us in Alcova it never got too hot and we didn’t have to worry about high water temps. Fish were happy. I mostly fished dry dropper to the banks and shallow riffles where we would find big fish on the dropper. Just a regular old Duracell was the one for me. Frenchie had its moments too but I definitely leaned on the Duracell pretty hard. Unfortunately we didn’t get the greatest hopper fishing but I did get to watch a few really big ones go for it. While that was anticlimactic most days, the dropper still made it exciting and I really think it worked better than nymphing did most days.
September dry fly sessions were awesome this year.
September had some insane dry fly days. Everything from the reef dam down to Bessemer had days and sections of fabulous dry fly fishing. The Trico hatch was great and the big fish got really keyed into the Trico dun’s. I stuck with my normal set up most days. Parachute Adams, renegades, Keller’s Rocky Mountain variant, and black Trico spinners were all you needed. As usual the first cast was crucial, but I did have a lot of sessions where the big trout would eat repeatedly and give anglers multiple chances. The most important thing for me as a guide was knowing WHEN to be where. The dry fly bite was usually around 9ish to 1130. There were days it lasted a bit longer almost all day but it was usually a late morning thing. I ended up stalling a lot in the morning in some of my favorite spots so people could sight fish to bigger fish. I just love waiting around for a hatch to start popping. Thankfully it was fairly reliable this September which made my job much easier, but ya still had to know when to be where for maximum enjoyment. It really is another whole level of fun when it’s so visual and you can pick out the alpha fish from the pod. My favorite thing about these hatches is really being able to see all the big fish still in the river. As I said before the freshmen class was annoying a lot of the year, so seeing how many big fish we still have the river was inspiring.
Seth with the biggest of the year, a hair over 30” taken on a sunken Trico.
October was good but our usually consistent period of dry fly fishing October 8 through the 20th was pushed back a bit. Instead of that window it really was more October 20th through mid November. The weather was fantastic. We didn’t get the usual Halloween storm and the bugs lasted till mid November. There were a lot of good November days especially on the lower river below town. The streamer fishing was awesome in the fall too. Casting kreelex’s and any minnow patterns into the pods of risers always gets a blow up. I absolutely hate when people do this. I’m all about the dry fly eats so I violently hate when all my friends just want to streamer fish. It literally kills me and part of my soul dies every time. It is a blast though and a really fun way to fish. The Platte is a great fall fishery, barely anybody around and lots of feeding fish. It’s also nice to spend some time on the lower river when it’s fishing well. I have a lot of people who have floated the Platte for years who haven’t got to see the lower river. It’s a nice change and your usually looking for bigger fish over just numbers. This year late May and early June had some really great days and then all fall long was good too. Let me know if you ever want to mix if up and check it out.
Streamer fishing was exceptionally good this year!
While we are talking about streamer fishing I must say that 2025 was a phucking awesome year for dragging streamers around. May through July was consistent. All of us at the reef fly shop and NPL had good streamer fishing. It wasn’t just me. Hooley was dominating as usual, Mason was beating them up, and Tuna was on the prowl with zurdles. Black sex dungeon was a big hit this year. Hooley really figured that out and pretty soon it’s all any of us were fishing. Trombones, Goldie’s, thin mints did the trick too. I brought the sparkle minnow back into rotation this year as well. In May I had some awesome days on the lower river, through town and below. It would get 20 eats or so a day. I don’t know why I ever stopped fishing that fly. So don’t be an idiot like me and fish the phuck outta that thing.
Barefoot in the sand flats, surrounded by mountains sight fishing. Carp fishing might be favorite thing about Wyoming.
The carp fishing was off the charts this year too. Pre spawn (May) through September was bonkers. For whatever reason this year the carp were very hungry. Lake levels were low so the wade fishing and boat fishing were both excellent. Most days we found many feeding carp that were happy to eat a well fished fly. I’ve really become a believer in darker flys. It’s not an absolute, but most of time I have more confidence in a darker fly. Think brown, black, olive. There are some patterns like the Great Lakes hammerhead pattern I do fish in white. The ankle biter is another that I like in a white. But darker flies a lot of the year work better for me. Jays back stabber in black is always a go to. Seth got me fishing balance leeches more this year than in years past. They don’t get caught on bottom much and produce eats. Brown or black were the colors for balanced leeches. For crayfish I use the reefs craydizzle (basically an olive clouded crayfish with furry foam for a back), whitlocks near nuff when I need something heavier for deeper water, an olive crawdak, and a lot of furry foam backed closer crayfish variations I tie. I will do an entire post on those later this winter with pictures. Strong arm merkins, black crazy Charlie’s (kinda small ones), and petersons spawning shrimp, and even flexo crabs worked too. I think I’m just being a dork but I think being in central Wyoming poling around on a flats skiff with saltwater flies is so cool. I know Jesus Christ, we are posers. I have gotten exponentially better at carp fishing the past few years and I’m really excited to take more people out to the lake. Carp on pathfinder are a really fun to puzzle to solve. You’ll see hundreds in an area for a week and it’ll be your honey hole and then you go back two days later and not see a single fish where there were once hundreds. While focusing on where the warm water is located is really important, it’s not everything. Knowing when to go to the miracle mile arm or the sweet water arm, canyon creek, or the bays directly below the Pedro mountains is crucial. Just cause the fish are there one day doesn’t mean they’ll be any two days later. Having the hog island skiff makes this easy though because we can zip around as needed. But the best aspect of carp is the sight fishing aspect. It’s just fun fishing and the fish fight hard. I hope you can come experience it.
Overall it was a good easy year here. I plan on pumping up carp trips for people. Basically if you’re coming for 3 or 4 days and go carping one day, I promise you’ll want to go do it again. It’s very addicting. Can’t really say what the snow levels are going to be. The whole country has had a mild winter especially in the Rockies, so hopefully it starts snowing soon. I’ll be around for all of this winter. Let me know if you want to come fish. There’s usually a lot of fun stuff we can do in the winter if the wind isn’t blowing.