TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

My last post had me dreaming of dry fly action on the Henrys Fork, and sad to say, it was a two week exercise in “hope springs eternal”. Maybe tomorrow the bugs will come out and the fish will start looking up? Apart from a few nights of substantial brown drake hatches, where I at least landed a big drake-eating whitefish, the trout just did not cooperate for me. Other anglers? Seems like the guy on the opposite bank from me is always landing a great fish.

One evening just before dark, when I’d seen not one fish bigger than 10″ eat a bug, the dude across from me fought and landed a horse. Another guy walked up and I listened to them from across the river. “It’s a solid 25 inches!”, one of them spurted. The second sport came back with, “It’s a carbon copy to the one I almost landed just up stream 20 minutes ago!”

Sigh.

So I moved over Raynolds Pass to Montana, where the Madison river is as reliable an old Labrador. I hoped to chase the salmonfly hatch, and I did get a small number of eats on the big bugs, but many more drive-bys and long looks. Variants of caddis flies scored a number of nice fish from runs that I hadn’t walked before.

While camped at Riverview, a big thunderstorm rolled through and gave everything a solid soaking. The next morning, my KTM, the bike I use to get around from base camp, started acting up. “General Failure!” the dash flashed at me. Long story short, water got into the dash and fried its brain. $1500 to fix it, more or less. Plus a visit to a dealer to program the new dash. The Bozeman KTM shop was six weeks out on appointment bookings.

I had been planning on going to South Dakota in the first week of August to renew my drivers license and get some other business taken care of, but I upped the schedule by a couple of weeks and started calling Yamaha dealers in the area to replace the glitching KTM. I made those calls from Hebgen lake near West Yellowstone, where I spent the the few days remaining before I had to cross the park and Wyoming, and I floated the Cherry Creek area looking for gulpers eating callibaetis. I caught a few, enough to call it decent.

On the way to Rapid City, I stopped at Ten Sleep Creek in the Bighorn mountains, maybe my favorite small stream in all of the west. I had a few more days left on my WY license from last season, so I spent a day boulder hopping up and down the canyon. A fish in almost every likely spot would eat whatever hoppy looking bug I tied on.

So, business sorted and a new bike in the garage (I bought a 2025 Yamaha Tenere 700), where to head next? My wish list for this summer had a week on the Missouri below Holter dam to fish the trico hatch, and a week on the Bighorn below Yellowtail to chase the PMDs. Plus, I wanted another week on Hebgen a little later in the season, as the callibaetis hadn’t really got going yet on my earlier visit.

Reports from the Missouri at Craig were that the water was getting too hot, but the crowds of anglers weren’t dissuaded. Bighorn reports had the PMDs coming “any day now”, so I booked a spot at Cottonwood Camp and have been on the water here for a week now.

I saw a few bugs the first couple of days, but the fish weren’t on them yet. Resorting to the bobber and nymph game resulted in one amazing fish and several lost opportunities. There is a run called “Hog Hole” where I lost more than one monster, the first of which broke the hook of my olive Spanish Bullet!

After losing a few more fish, I resorted to fishing to the huge pod of suckers and carp that were cruising the big back eddy that day and landed a couple of the big suckers. There is something to be said for the native fish, that were swimming in this river thousands of years before white people arrived and stocked the German browns and California rainbows.

I’ve also spent a couple of days trying to sight fish the carp in a side channel that I had success on the last time I visited. It is hard to tell if you’ve successfully fooled the fish you’ve hooked until it nears the net… fishing in murky water occasionally results in a foul hooking, and this time the bruiser carp I netted was hooked in the dorsal fin rather than in the mouth. But what a fish!

The last two days have finally seen the fish coming up to eat the hatching PMDs, and I finally got some great dry fly action. Brief, but what action! Thursday I was able to hook the first fish that I cast to, and though he broke me off, I got three more of his neighbors to eat and landed one of them.

Before the fish started rising, I was swinging a pair of wet flies that might imitate the emerging bugs, and I hooked a fish in the first few casts, then lost it. Then I hooked a big brown, which turned out to be foul hooked, right in the meat of its side. When it was finally tired enough to bring to the net, it had gotten down stream of me and I had to horse it against the current, to which it was broadside, and just as I was about to reach with the net, my six weight rod snapped into three pieces!

It’s the second time I’ve broken that rod on a river in Montana. I wonder if Reddington will warranty it twice?

Yesterday, I landed two fish from the same run, and they were both spectacular. The rainbow jumped four times coming straight at me, causing me to run backwards to try and keep a tight line. Then when he got close and saw me, he turned tail and ran halfway across the river. The brown was also a jumper, and it was just about the perfect fish. Kind of a tricky longer cast across a current seam, it ate on the second drift and then jumped around a bit. A shortish fight and the fish was hooked right in the nose, the best spot for minimal trauma, and the fly fell out on its own as soon as it was netted. Just perfect.

The Bighorn is a fabulous river, and even though the action might not be hot all day long, the short bursts it has given me are memorable and well worth my efforts. I might just come straight back here after my trip up north next week.