The scenery was nothing spectacular and the City of Casper was okay. The river was bigger than I had pictured. We checked it out the day before and the water level was low, clear and the river had just turned a week or two before and a lot of moss was pulling free. The temps were in the 60's in the afternoon and near 30 in the morning.
We decided our best bet for the notoriously hugh North Platte rainbows was to float. We headed out early the next day and drove about 30 minutes west (upstream) of town and dropped in on BLM land. We were told the lower section was fishing better than just below the dam.
Shortly after starting out and around the first bend my buddy and I both hooked into two nice 22 inch rainbows. Playing them on smaller 5 wt. rods was fun and got our hearts racing in the cold morning air. We were rigged with 5 wt. rods and 3x leaders and 5x tippet. We were using a size 20 baetis nymph dropped from a size 18 bead head baetis nymph dropped from a large San Juan Red Worm. The other standby setup on the North Platte is a large white streamer (http://www.wyomingflyfishing.com/vanilla_bugger.aspx).
In the morning, the rainbows were all over the red worms and we easliy took around 15 good size rainbows each in about 2 hours. Around 11am the fishing slowed and we had lunch and watched two golden eagles pick off ducks on a sand bar.
Around 2pm the fishing started getting hot again. We got into several decent sized Blue Wing Olive hatches and the fish started slamming the baetis nymphs. No surface action was visible and the fish were probably taking the emergering nymphs as they pulled off the bottom and headed for the surface. The hatches were so thick at times that it was like being in a mosquito swam in Minnesota.
We ended the trip on a good note and landed more +20 inchers. We each netted around 25 fish with the sizes ranging from 16 inches to 22 inches. No big pigs but consistently good size rainbow trout, no browns. My buddy foul hooked a huge 24 inch sucker.
Overall the trip was great and I would highly recommend the North Platte to anyone looking for an opportunity to land big fish. The nice thing about the Platte is that it's only a 4.5 hour drive from Denver. I can't wait to do it again.
