NOTE THE DATE CHANGE to FEBRUARY 25th
Our Chapter Gathering – Join us in-person!
This meeting will be at the Fort Collins Senior Center
NO, it’s NOT just for old people, it’s just a good place to meet.
At our membership meetings this Fall we plan to take some time for our newer members to meet other chapter members. And hopefully start developing new friendships and meeting new fishing friends. Join us at 6:30 for socializing, the meeting kicks off at 7:00. We hope you will be there!
This Month’s Speaker:
Professor, Chris Myrick, CSU Fisheries
‘Confessions of a Colorado Streamer Junkie’
This month’s speaker: Professor, Chris Myrick of CSU Fisheries
Chris Myrick is a professor of fish and conservation biology and also the research associate dean for the Warner College of Natural Resources at Colorado State University. He’s a family man and proud father of two children who are in college and he is also a life-long angler, with almost 50 years of serious fishing in the rear-view mirror. Chris sort of taught himself to fly fish on the sand flats and bays of Sydney Harbour with modest success and only got exposed to and experienced freshwater fly fishing in northern California in the early 1990s on waters like the Pit and Sacramento Rivers while he was working his way through college and graduate school. After completing his Ph.D. at the University of California at Davis, Chris was fortunate enough to land a job at Colorado State University as an assistant professor of fish and conservation biology in January of 2000 and has been at CSU since, moving up through the ranks from assistant professor to associate, and then to full professor. He and his students do research on a variety of topics, but the most recent focus has been on the design and evaluation of different types of fish ladders for small native fishes. His real love in the academic realm, however, is teaching, and he currently teaches an introductory fish biology course as well as senior- and graduate level courses in aquaculture and fish physiology. Chris fishes as much and as widely as he can, is perhaps notorious for his “slight detours” on business trips to get a bit of fishing in, and has yet to find a fish species that he didn’t think was amazing.
The title of the talk is Confessions of a Colorado Streamer Junkie, so if you are a reluctant streamer fisherman - like myself - but would like insight on how some anglers become passionate adherents to this technique, then this is the talk for you.
Our speaker this month will be Chris Myrick. Chris is a professor of fish and conservation biology and also the research associate dean for the Warner College of Natural Resources at Colorado State University. Chris is also a lifelong multi-species and multi-technique angler who drifted away from fly fishing for trout soon after arriving in Colorado in 2000 and instead became obsessed with targeting big predatory fish with conventional tackle and especially big swimbaits (7– 14” long lures). This move was perhaps a bit illogical given that he was now in Colorado where the trout fishing was superb and had previously been in northern California where the fishing for big predators was superb.
After about 15 years of almost exclusively using big lures to chase even big predators like bass, walleye, and northern pike, Chris was dragged back into the fly-fishing world during a two-day float trip on the Rio Grande with some former students. While all the other anglers were having great success on green drakes and salmon flies and the like, Chris could not hook a fish and, as might be expected, his frustration was rising faster than the mayflies. Luckily, a good friend suggested he try a streamer and that he “fish it just like a swimbait”. Not only did tying on a streamer turn the trip around, it also rekindled his interest in fly-fishing with a new twist – streamer fishing. That interest became a passion and that passion then became an obsession – Chris is now a self-diagnosed and unrepentant streamer junkie.
In his presentation Chris is going to talk about his streamer journey and, hopefully, provide some tidbits of information that might help you with your streamer fishing here in Colorado, even if it does not make you exchange your light fly rods and fly boxes full of dries and nymphs for a quiver of 7- and 8-weight cannons and giant fly boxes full of 4 to 7” long streamers.
Monthly Fly Swap
This month’s Fly Swap theme is ‘Foam Flys’
Participants tie a fly for each of their fellow participants, (typically under 10), with a Recipe tag on each one.
In return you get a fly, with its Recipe, from each of the tyers.
For information contact our Fly Swap Coordinator, Dave Morse