Fishing 'til you turn Green

The first stop on the FRAA2008 tour is the Green River. I'm going to pick up my buddy Bill at the Salt Lake City airport on the morning of Sunday, July 27th and from there we'll make the 4-hour trek to the edge of the Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Dutch John, Utah.

Unlike many of the other streams on our road trip, this will not be the first time we've fished the Green River. I've been there a couple of times before and Bill and I did a do-it-yourself wade trip in the summer 2007 as well, but on that occasion we only fished a single day. We caught a ton of fish and had a blast but, frankly, our Green River trip last year wasn't nearly long enough to do the river justice. By my estimate, we fished only about one mile of water and the section we chose to fish was without a doubt the most heavily fished mile of water out of the 10+ miles of wadeable tailwater. I find myself dreaming not about the fish we caught (and there were many) but about the fish we left behind.

So the question is... given the sheer number of streams we're planning to visit, how many days should we spend on the Green River? I've always wanted to float the Green River, so we're definitely going to do that on Monday... but how many more days should we stay?

Yesterday, I finished reading Utah's Green River: A Fly Fisher's Guide to the Flaming Gorge Tailwater and it really got me excited about fishing some of the other (comparatively) less-trafficked areas. My current thought is that we should stay AT LEAST through Tuesday and maybe even into Wednesday. I guess it depends on how early we can get to the river on Sunday. Assuming we're on the water by 3:00pm, we'd still have five solid hours to fish before having to call it a day. But something tells me we won't be there that early, so maybe we should consider fishing the Green all the way through Wednesday.

Given all that we're trying to accomplish with the FRAA2008 roadie, can we really justify spending three days on one river? That's the burning question for today.