Unofficial trout bum breaks the rules at Dead Horse

There's an axiom that every day spent fishing is a day added to your lifespan. If this is true, then Ray Evans of Cottonwood is going to live a long, long time.

You've heard of the “$5 fly” - the one that catches fish no matter what so it's darn well worth it? This is the one that does it at Dead Horse Ranch State Park, Ray's Dead Horse fly. RIH photo/Art Merrill

I'd spent a frustrating hour not catching trout when I first met Ray. There I was, getting nothing, while this man fishing the same lagoon was catching fish one after the other with maddening regularity. I sidled over to him and introduced myself. Ray stopped reeling them in long enough to share several of his secrets of success. His techniques, it turns out, are on the edge of antipathy of to common- sense trout fishing.

“Use a sinking line and a long sturdy leader made of fluorocarbon,” he said. “And use a large, soft-hackled fly with a medium speed retrieve.” Ray then carefully picked a large, #6 green fly from his fly box and handed it to me.

“Try this,” he said.

Now, everybody knows that trout like tiny flies and require the stealth of light leaders, and that you only need sinking lines for deep or fast water. But Ray discovered that nobody told the trout at Dead Horse. I caught two trout on my first two casts with Ray’s fly and technique.

“These trout are raised in a cage so you don’t have to ‘'match the hatch,”'” he said.

“Just give them a fly with some action to it and the fish will react.”

The author and Ray compare notes while fishing the Dead Horse upper lagoon. RIH photo/Art Merrill

“Each day is a little different from the ones before, so each day is a new challenge,” he said. Which fly pattern will the fish prefer? What color fly do the trout want? The other aspect to the fun for Ray is designing and tying his own flies for Dead Horse. Ray’s search for the right answers keeps him happy for hours; he enjoys the challenge and an average of 15 to 20 trout per day are the reward for his persistence.

Not your stereotypical trout bum, Ray said he's worked hard all his life and has earned the right to fish at Dead Horse to his heart’s content. A resident of Cottonwood since 1999, Ray is a former civil engineer; he's been fishing for some 40 years, and he devotes a lot more time to it now that he's retired. With Dead Horse so close to home, he's able to go just about every day, making him an unofficial resident authority. Ray can tell you which lagoon is fishing best. He can also point out where the fish might be hiding and when the lagoons last got a stocking of rainbows.

This is Ray's own hand-tied, never-fail Dead Horse arsenal, learned from years of fishing the same water on a near-daily basis. Ray says on a bad day he only catches (and releases) a dozen fish. RIH photo/Art Merrill