Winter Fishing with Egg Patterns on a River

Jim and Dan go out on a frigid winter day to fish a river. They catch trout and a white fish using egg pattern flies naturally scented with saved trout egg juice.

Dan shows the bounce rig they are using and demonstrates how to make a willow stick stringer to take fish home. They see mink tracks and a beaver lodge.
It’s the Provo River [Utah] and its 8° F. We are going to get some trout. Dan is already bringing one in.

This fish can just lay here on the ice until we are ready to take him home, unless some mink comes out and takes him. A friend of mine sent a video link to me in an email where these guys were fishing in an ice house. This mink came into their ice house and they were all laughing and taking this video, until he grabbed one of the biggest fish they had in the corner and took off with it.

Where it is legal to use bait, this is the secret weapon. I have a little aspirin bottle here and it is full of eggs that were saved from a fish we kept before. You put this egg juice on the artificial eggs and the fish will hold onto those artificial eggs just a half second longer before they try to spit it out. There he has another one [trout] on. Sometimes winter fishing is fast.

I’m going to refresh my juice on the artificial egg. A lot of times I like to use a stick to do this because it gets your fingers oily and on a day like today [very cold], I want to keep my hands out of the water as much as possible. I’m going to try to catch a fish on the very next cast. If it works, we are going to do it again. We are going to do it until it doesn’t work.

Notice this casting is resistance casting, it’s not back and forth casting like you ordinarily see for fly fishing because you are throwing weight. That’s where I wanted to be. We are fishing with artificial egg patterns that are juiced up with real egg juice.

Ohhh… That’s a nice one. That’s a brown trout there. Now Jim is fishing and were going to show something that is a little unusual, you will see it here in a minute. There are not big, but two fish at the same time [on different tags] on those egg patterns.