Took the wife & daughter on a week long road trip to her parents house in Cedar City Utah over the holiday. Trip wouldn't be complete without my little 14' Alum. can in tow, or an overnight stop in VEGAS! Managed to play blackjack until around 4AM when I crawled up to the room $20 up.

The father in law is a contractor & his finisher bailed on a job that he was fighting a tight deadline so I spent the first & last day helping him instead of fishing but still managed to get 4 days trout time in. There was a litter of 6 week old kittens at the house to keep the family busy:

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Between Cedar City & St. George in Southern Utah is Quail Canyon Reservoir, one of the better Lg. Mouth lakes in Utah but has some good trout as well. It's one of the few warm water lakes but is deep so the trout do well. I started the morning looking for bass but only found tiny fish & a couple dead bass in the 5-7 lb. range? Finally I spot the dark back of a nice fish deep under a tree so I pitch a 3" Big Hammer under there, as he sinks out my line twitches so I set & end up snagging this 22" Lg mouth in the side on 6 lb. test. He takes me through some bushes & heads out to the center of the cove behind me. I had to go in & thread my rod through the tree before I could turn the boat to follow the fish. When I do get it in sight I see it's very skinny & covered in lg. "Ick" like spots with some of the scales actually being red, bloodshot looking? I touched the fish as little as possible, giving up on bass fishing.

With an 80 deg. surface temp. I figured looking in the deeper sections of the lake (100+ ft.) would be the place to find the trout. This lake is built where 2 canyons come together with a dam in each. Both are filled with major valleys & peaks but one arm is much deeper than the other. This is tough when fishing down riggers & leadcore, lots of lost gear as well as frustration, esp. when fishing solo. It was near noon, 100 deg. out & all I had to show for hrs. of trolling was a couple sm. bass along with a couple lg. bluegill & a mystery break off that I'm sure was a big trout. While desperately combing the shallow arm I found a 35' hole in a 15' flat stacked with marks. As soon as I slid the downrigger down the needlefish was bit by a beautiful quality rainbow:

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I repeated this a couple times knowing exactly when they would bite:

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I decided to park & stay on these fish with the trolling motor in an attempt to get them on the 2 & 4 lb. test. Being down 30 - 35' made it tough with the little jigs & they just wouldn't bite any of the metal lures I was winding & jigging through them? I finally rigged up a Glow in the Dark Big Hammer Perch Grub on a sm. leadhead with a dropper loop above it which I attached a TINY bead head crappie jig that looks more like a fly. It was on:

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It was literally shooting fish in a barrel but was very sweet because I worked so hard to figure out these fish, having 'em all to myself didn't hurt either. I caught over 30 15"-21" wild or holdover rainbows in less than 2 hrs until I was out of jigs. It seems once a fish was hooked on the top bait the excitement would often trigger a fish to hit the other jig as well, many of these double hook-ups didn't end well with the 4 lb test:

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Julie's (my wife) Grandfather drove down from Colorado, meeting up with us in Cedar City. We left in the morning for Panguitch Lake where we had rented a cabin for a couple of nights above the Cedar Breaks:

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It took a little while to figure out the fish here as well, everything was twice the size as I had seen these lakes in years past. The quantity wasn't what we've previously experienced but the size of many of the fish made it all worthwhile including one humbling break off on a trolled 3" Hammer that I won't soon forget. Many of these larger rainbows had the slight red cut marks under their gills indicating that they are wild fish, the result of crossbreeding between rainbows and the wild cutthroats:

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A couple of nice Cutthroats:

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It was a great time with the family, esp. spending time with Julie's 80 yr. old grandpa, ex long ranger. He was a fixture on my boat pretty much every outing on the mountain:

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My daughter had a blast as well, proving once again she's got my blood:

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In her hand is a Chub, a baitfish like a shiner. She carried that thing around all day, playing with it, talking to it, putting it back in her bucket 5 seconds at a time every hr. or so to keep him "alive". If it wasn't for Mom she would have kissed it. They were inseparable, until whatever came in the middle of the night found it.

Stopped by Bass Pro Shops in Vegas on the way back, nice display's & tons of Lg. Mouth stuff but doesn't compare to the ones in Texas & Florida.

Another fantastic trip with the family, looking forward to some salt though!

Josh