Can a Brother Get a Brown?

Another gorgeous week of fall fishing in western Montana. Winter may be right around the corner but your wouldn't know that from the weather recently: Cold snaps yes but generally super pleasant conditions for this our closing month of Bitterroot trout fishing. Afternoon hatches of Mahoganies and BWO's are keeping the fish consistently on the feed while the big boys are staking out territory for the spawn. Once the weather finally takes a turn to winter we'll break out the 9-weights and start looking for a Steelhead or two. November anyone?

Around these parts it has been lights-out knock-down drag-out fishing for the normally elusive Salmon trutta, aka Bronw trout, aka "man in the brown suit", aka Andre3000. That last one is not actually a euphemism for brown trout but when a big one finally engulfs my streamer i am liable to yell just about anything, such as"Geronimo!" or  "F*ck yeah randy!". Enthusiasm and persistence are good traits for any kind of fishing but especially so for the intermittent action you get from big browns: Some runs have em', most runs do not, and by golly i'm going to cast to every single one of them. Add a little bit of non-trout wildlife and you have yourself a postcard Montana autumn day.

Power eagles

Powereagle!

Snowing 

October Missouri Trout Camp USA

Of all the rivers in Montana that i have fished, the one i daydream about by far the most is the Missouri. With its outstanding numbers of large fish, phenomenally dense hatches, technical angling conditions, and a lifetime of fishy water to explore, i never tire of fishing here. It was only natural then that our end-of-season / back-to-back birthday blowout party should be held here: Fly, walk, float or drive to Craig MT. cause thats where the party is.

With hot flies in hand from  Headhunters  we set out for 5 days in trout fishing mecca. From Holter dam all the way to Cascade we fished it all, every fishy riffle and run worked to the best of our addled abilities. The fishing was sometimes methodical sometimes absentminded: You can only keep your serious game-face on for the first several miles of insanely perfect trout water, after that things start to look the same and you find yourself miles from the takeout and its getting dark fast. Things at this point can get sloppy. Very sloppy. Like "looking for rafts midnight boat rodeo style with headlights" sloppy. A story for another time. . . .

Other Man In The Brown Suit

We experienced the whole range of fishing conditions over this past week. We had snow so thick you could not see your fly period, let alone figure out when a fish finally got around to slurping it. We had blue-bird clear skies and WIND like only the Mo' can deliver. Gotta love the W coming in strong and making the fly flicking a gordian ordeal. There were also periods of calm with light snow in which the river fished better than any of us had ever seen. A whole run worth of fish all deciding to feed at the same time? Special stuff. More evidence to suggest that you should only bother fishing when the weather is damm near inclement: If i'm not wadered up with gortex on top whats the point of going out at all!  We gave the Mo' all it could handle this trip and we will definitely be back again next year. I hope that next years stories turn out just a little bit milder. Mahalo.

Red White & Blue All The Time