Fishing at Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir with the EZ-PTG Solar Generator
Blue Mesa Reservoir is the largest lake in Colorado. It is an absolutely beautiful high country reservoir, straddling the Gunnison river in the Curecanti National Recreation area. Blue Mesa is one of the best cold water fisheries in Colorado, with an abundance of Kokanee Salmon, huge Lake trout (the record is 50# !!) and lots of other trout. We recently went camping and fishing up there, using the EZ-PTG Solar Generator and one solar suitcase as our sole power source.
First, I’ll give you the fishing report, followed by an update on how the EZ-PTG Solar Generator worked for us. Blue Mesa is very deep, up to 300’ in places, and the fish are usually down deep. So it is common to troll from a boat, using tackle that allows you to get deep. Our fish finder was reporting fish at 25’ and below, so we spent the first two days trying depths of 25’-40’. We caught two fish the first day and 2 the second. It was terrible! After talking to several people who were having great success, we finally figured it out. We started trolling at 10-15’, and let the fish come up from below to attack our shiny dodgers and pink squids. Here are the results of 3 hours of trolling:
It is usually nice and sunny at Blue Mesa, but this week, rainstorms came through almost every day. This is actually a blessing, as you can see the water level is at least 40’ below normal from the drought last year. Three of us were staying at Lake Fork campground, which has a central dump station and fresh water but no electrical or other hookups at the camp sites. So we powered the pop up truck camper solely with one EZ-PTG-100W Solar Suitcase and and one of our Power-To-Go Solar Generators, the EZ-PTG-DELUXE. This is what our campsite looked like:
We only used one Solar Suitcase for this trip, but we really should have used two or three. There were several cloudy days and an extra panel would have helped. Even so, we still managed to run the camper, making coffee, running the toaster, using lights and radio, every day for 5 days without running out of power. We even used the EZ-PTG to recharge the boat trolling motor battery!
We did discover an interesting limitation to the EZ-PTG-DELUXE. Well, it’s not really a limitation, but to some people it might be. My friend’s pop up camper had a large reservoir style Kuerig coffee maker, something like the picture below. This coffee maker simply uses too much power.
I don’t know if you have seen the controversy on this pod style coffee maker, but I don’t trust them. There are numerous reports of bacterial growth in them. This alone is enough for me to not like this type of coffee maker. But it is also simply too big for typical RV use. And it uses a lot of energy to keep the water hot all day.
I much prefer my little Walmart $20 Single Cup pod brewer. It takes up very little room, uses not much energy and makes a great cup of coffee in about 90 seconds. My tall vacuum coffee mug even fits!
Lake Fork campground and marina is a wonderful camping and fishing spot. It also has numerous hikes and bike trails nearby. The campground does enforce generator quiet hours, so the EZ-PTG-DELUXE and a Solar Suitcase were a perfect fit. If you want to know more about Blue Mesa fishing, send us an email to LeisureSolar@gmail.com.