Bear Flats

All week I have been looking forward to this weekend, normally I fish with a bud or for some solitude, however on occasion I get lucky enough to go up with my wife and son. This week Cindi, Carter and my dog Allie as well as some family friends all went up to go camping at Bear Flats along Tonto Creek. While I didn't get to commit as much time to fishing as I would prefer its well worth it to have my family along, as well as Cindi always takes some fantastic pictures.

We arrived to the camping spot mid day on Friday. Luckily considering it was spring break weekend we still had the area to ourselves. It was cool and some rain had just passed through. After unpacking and getting the tent set up I was quickly rigging up for the river. All three of us headed down and rather quickly started catching fish. They were hitting size 16-18 Pheasant tail. The highlight of the first day was a 15" Brown. We all fished together for a couple hours before heading back to camp to get a fire going and to get dinner started.

After a sleepless cold night on an air mat that turns out to have a rather large hole in it I snuck out at first light with my friend to try to get a few fish in before breakfast. I landed another 15 incher as well as I hooked into another fish that looked to be a couple inches larger but I lost him at the net, I guess that gives me a reason to go back.


When my son went down for a nap I seized the chance to hike up the river a ways to see what I could find. Not to far after I started my trek a storm started to blowing over. Just as it started to rain and the thunder started to shake the ground I noticed some fish rising in a slow moving run. There was no way I was going to turn back now that I'd seen several fish rising (first time for the year) no matter how mush it started to pour. So with hands shacking with anticipation I snipped off my nymph rig and tied on a size 18 Adams dry fly and started sneaking into the river. After a few casts I was rewarded with a small Brown shooting to the surface for my first hook up on a dry for the year. Just about then the rain really started to come down so I went back to make sure my family was surviving the storm. After finding them napping in the tent I was heading right back out to my rising fish. When I got back to the pool the rain which had turned to hail started to lighten up and I found even more fish rising then before. When I looked to try to find out what they were rising for I found Mayflies floating down the river one after another so my Adams was a perfect match for the hatch. On my third cast I was rewarded with a beautiful brown shooting up to slurp my dry, over the next 30 minutes I was able to land 4 more fish in the 10-12" range with one measuring up to be a 13" beauty.

Over all it was a great weekend with family, good friends, and great fishing, not to mention a perfect fire side steak dinner cooked up by Aaron.

Here are several pictures of fish and shots taken by my very talented wife.