For the warm months of July and August, we here at Trickflies.ca usually put away the float tubes and chase trout in streams. The reason for this is that during the warmer periods the trout here tend to go deep and become really selective or seem to not feed at all. Also most of the locations we float tube fly fish are stocked ponds and haven't been stocked since mid-April. This year with the scare of Whirling Disease the province of Alberta has decided to cut back all the stocking programs for this season which only further hurts the mid-season fishing. I had a few hours to kill last night and decided to give Cardiff Park Pond a mid-season fish.

 Cardiff Park Pond is located about 20 minutes North of Edmonton, just minutes east of Morinville (which also has two stocked ponds). This usually beautiful pond used to be a coal mine, but after a partial collapse of one of the shafts it was decided that the mine would be flooded and stocked with rainbow trout. With its close vicinity to Edmonton, Cardiff Park Pond sees a fair bit of shore fishing pressure and one is challenged to find a spot to fish from shore on any weekend. Although usually stocked twice with over 15000 rainbow trout each time, this year stocking was cut back to 10000 total thus far.  

 I started the evening off trolling a Doc Spratley Green size 10 and within the first 5 minutes caught a little 8 inch rainbow. I continued to troll the Doc Spratley Green for about 30 minutes without another bite and decided to change flies. The next hour or so was spent trying 5 or 6 different flies with little luck when I tied on a Beadhead Woolly Bugger Olive size 10 and caught another little 8" rainbow. From there I tried a Pheasant Tail size 14 and had a few good hits but couldn't hook up with another fish.

Cardiff Park Pond is usually an 8 fish an hour pond in the evening but the combination of low fish stocking and high pressure (seriously people, pick up your garbage) means that the fish count was low. Fun was still had and with so few summer evenings left, I'll take any chance to get out fly fishing I can.