<\/p>\n
The City of Cortez and the Dolores River Anglers had a great turnout during the seventh annual Fishing Festival & Derby on Saturday at Parque de Vida pavilion and pond.<\/p>\n
Organizer Brad Waltman said that while there were 90 people that signed up, there were well over 100 that came out to fish.<\/p>\n
Waltman and instructors Chris Purkat, Duncan Rose, Shane Hale and Paul Morey taught children and adults the ins and outs of fly fishing \u2013 including information about bugs and different techniques for casting and knot tying \u2013 with the event concluding with a fishing derby.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve just watched this community grow with the fishing derby,\u201d said Waltman. \u201cWe did about two-hundred dollars in prizes this year and we just keep giving more out each year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elysha Mustache was the first-place winner on Saturday, catching the first fish of the derby as well as the largest fish (14 inches).<\/p>\n
Deerynn Ford finished second with a catch of 13.75 inches, and Kaden Nielson was third with a catch of 13.5 inches.<\/p>\n
Alicia and Creed Wilford and family finished the derby with the most fish caught.<\/p>\n
Waltman noted that in the past \u2013 due to his schedule \u2013 the event had taken place during the week.<\/p>\n
But by finally being able to host the festival on a Saturday, he believed that more people were able to attend and show up earlier.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just want to thank everybody that came out and brought their kids,\u201d he said. \u201cI saw a lot of family bonding. It was great.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seventh annual festival and derby may have been best yet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":104691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6328,6313],"tags":[21],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-104690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports-2-more-sports","category-sports-2","tag-cortez"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104690"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=104690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}