When The Browns Are Knocking.

Well well well. This is why I stick around after a long summer on the river and stay firmly seated in the rowers chair. Holy smokes people : You want to talk about a solid start to fall fishing. I had mentioned a certain reason why I love fishing this time of year in Bitterroot September Outlook: Its buttery golden brown colored, toothy, and very very randy. "Fuck Yeah Randy". I will be saying that mantra early and often if this last weeks low river Brown trout haul keeps coming. I mean sometimes the river god just smiles and there's a kyped out tank lurking under every single bush and tree. Seemingly anyway, sometimes you just have to believe that a trout is waiting in that shadow and BOOM. Blamo. Kill bubba kill. In between days like this and the ever-growing allure of lazy days floating the Clark Fork and I feel I will be a very busy fly-slinger this fall. Countdown til British Columbia and giant steelhead can wait another few weeks, I got brownies to catch!

Oh yeah, also caught a pike.

Pay no attention to the man behind the greenish brown trout

Bitterroot September Outlook

My last post was about tactics for surviving (SURVIVE!) the always  sometimes brutal stretch of mid August we've come to know and love: Not much hatching other than the seemingly ubiquitous hopper hatch and long, hot afternoons to keep them fishes down sulking. While the Tricos have kept the morning bite going it is certainly not my favorite part of the fishing calendar, staring at microscopic black parachutes in the wee morning hours waiting for a giant sipping to sip. Not my favorite medicine. Sip That Syrup.  But then it's over, as if a mirage, and the blistering August heat is a thing of the past.  The sweatshirts, waders, and the Ravalli county fair all signal the first cool mornings and the turning of seasons into my absolute favorite : Fall Fishing Is Here!!!!

Autumn has few detractors that I know of so this is mostly a bandwagon jumping rant with no hipster credit to be gleaned ("I was into fall fishing waayyyyyy before all these other people were"). However.  Brown trout blend in with the leaves changing colors and they look extra pretty. The Rainbows come out in the afternoons to eat flotillas of mayflies with cool composure. Eagles and Ospreys are seemingly in every tree from bend to bend. Add to that the swarming crowds of summer are long gone and their is something resembling SOLITUDE to found out on the river again. That is truly the best, the feeling of having a ten mile float of river to your lonesome self and pod after pod of risers to shoot at. Something close to Heaven.

But back to those Autumn Browns. ..

I Love Goooooooold!

Brown trout this time of year are as eager and willing to eat a fly as they will ever be. The ever elusive Salmo trutta takes a break from its reputation of being the picky eaters of the trout world and in indulge in a month-long spawning / killing spree that would have made even Luca Brasi jealous. Anything moving around their territory is fair game right now, the skated dry fly, the swung nymph , and the biggest thing living in your flybox are all dead to rights anywhere near them. Their extra splash of seasonal golden color matches the surroundings and makes for super cool pictures. It also adds to their growing nut-fire self confidence and makes them believe they are invisible. They are not. Not when they come charging out of woodpiles and ledges to crush any suspected would-be assailants. God I love these fish when they aren't finicky f@#$s.

This all means it is time to revel in the glory ride into the sunset that is Autumn flyfishing in Montana. The scenery, solitude, and dry fly bite gets as good as it ever will. The smart anglers and those just getting the last sunny day of indian summer will all be rewarded with the best season (in my opinion) that the river has to offer. Nothing left to say but "set the hook, fish awwwwn!" .

Chromer. Steelhead bae'.

Last Bow' of Summer.

Coach's Corner : Throwback Thursday Scott Edition

Scott Week is always a good week long trip for the BRG crew. The Scotts have been making this annual father & son outing for many years now with Alex and this year I found fortune when I was invited on their annual excursion to the "ROOT" as one of their guides.  For three days these enthusiastic fellas worked every inch of water with expectant enthusiasm. From spruce moths to the big bug we threw them all, caught a handful of fish, and maybe created a few vivid fishing stories along the way.

My Lady Anna made some "huckleberry buckle" for the guys,  Hey Mike he likes it!

This was the first year this trip occured during the now semi-annual "Hoot Owl" period of the summer. We knew it was coming.  A little earlier than expected but it's what's best for the fish right?  Now how does a guide still make memories happen for those adventurers that put away time and money to enjoy our back yard and what it has to offer?  "Simple?"  "Maybe?" Getting an early start will work, at least help us out greatly. Meet times at 6:00am will happen for the main stem of the Root and if the West Fork is on the menu then you will witness the boat hatch that comes off at the normal hours of 8:00 to 10:00am.  But this years Hoot Owl is not as bad as it may sound.  Find the right guide, be optimistic, plan ahead, make those shots and put it in front of the fish and BANG magic happens.

s

Working Spruce moths in the canyon

Grilled pork chops on the river  BRG style!!

Mike and his boys have a passion for the wild side and it showed during this week.

Both a Fish and a Story Ahead: Mike Scott Rock!

What do a broken rowing seat, 16" cutty, and a perfectly placed rock have in common? 

 A predicament!!!

Thank goodness Alex can walk on water and Mike has nerves of steel!  Definitely a memory maker but then I guess you really had to be there.  Thanks for being there A-Train.

Fish flop!  Take that Human! 

August Basics : How The Tough Get Going.

Dog Days.

Summer Slump.

Hot Moon.

"Dink fest"

Mid August is a very real thing right now. The glory days of early summer are a fond memory and the bonanza of fall hatches have yet to materialize. The river keeps trucking right along but the finned critters within hold their appetites and wait for tastier fare. Too smokey to hike, too smokey to bike, too smokey to kick the fútbol around. Gotta go to the river. How to catch the fish right now requires a few key refinements in the flyfishermans approach to keep fish hitting the net.

Be The Early Bird:
I am not an early morning person as anyone who knows me will tell you. First light is not a light I see often. Nor am I a fisherman who gets wrapped up in being first boat on the water everyday. An extra pot of tea and a stop at the flyshop before hitting the river is my preferred speed.

Usually.

Right now, however, even I recognize the necessity of hitting the river early. The wee morning hours are a flyfishermans best friend: Morning water temperatures are coming down to their lowest point around 5am before their gradual daily climb. All the old hat guides know this and the fish know it too. More comfortable for the trouts to move around and hunt. The low light angle of early morning makes the big ones less wary too, no penetrating afternoon sun to x-ray them for the ospreys. The last dregs of summer mayflies are hatching around this time along with the blizzard clouds of Tricos on the lower river, giving the fish something to think about for breakfast. Got to eat a lot of these tiny bugs to make a meal, meaning you get more than one chance to get the drift right. Don't count on the good times to last though: These bugs are gone by 11am. Get out and get that dryfly action when the fish let you, move on to other projects by afternoon.

Be The Outlier:
Why do you think people love spring Skwala season so much? Its because the fish are famished and they haven't seen fake flies in months. Anything green and #8 will do. By this late point in the fishing season, however, the trout have seen a lot of different patterns presented in a lot of different ways.

Different Ways:  Swung, stripped, plopped, dropped, drug, skated, ripped, hand-lined, land-lined,  and . . . ..  perfectly dead-drifted. Again and again.

From the giant foam stonefly patterns to the ultra sneaky dropper brigade they have seen quite a frickin few flies. Sometimes the tried and true patterns will get the big fish to eat and sometimes they won't. Factor in mid-summer low water and hot afternoon temperatures and you have the recipe for lots of refusals. Everybody is fishing hoppers, lazy fishing guides like me (sometimes) and weekend warrior types too. Fish an ant or a beetle instead to those sneaky undercut banks instead. Fish a single #18 Hares Ear instead of hanging it from a hopper. Be the one fly the fish haven't seen that day and they will usually be happier to cooperate.

Be Specific:
Mid summer means the river is in its low-water main channel and the runs / pools / fishy spots are pretty damm evident. That doesn't mean you should just plop your fly right in the gut of the run and wait for a fish to attack it. When the fish are in mid-summer full-tilt feeding frenzy they are often moving a long way out of their lie to get your drift. Trust me, I look for fish every day and I see where they come from. Not so much right now. The little fish might move around like normal but the big guys are conserving energy and waiting for something to come directly overhead. Spend some time and really look at where the prime spot is and make sure you are getting good drifts in this spot. "Less searching, more shooting" is how I phrase it for clients. When looking for good fish you are not fishing the whole run anymore, you are fishing a 2 x 2 zone in the prime part of the lie. Make your casts here and Make your casts count. Which leads me into sub-point #1


#1 Be A First Cast Killer:
As with most thing the most important rule is last. If you want that big sneaky Rainbow to come eat your fly,  make sure your first cast is the best cast. Wade softly. Get the right amount of line out initially. Powder your fly. Don't false cast directly over your fish. Reach cast the first time, not the 10th. Pressured fish will not give you three chances to catch em', you will get one and only one. And the first cast should be that one.

Go out and get em'!

Two Bamboo Rods At The Trout Petting Zoo

It's always hard to pick out any specific day of trout fishing from a gruelingly long guide season. As present and aware as we are to be able to get the rod bent everyday the individual fish seem to get lost somewhere in the mix. The rocks are the same day to day, the flies patterns change with the slow seasonal cycle of weather and water conditions, and the trout. . . . . .. well the trout start to look the same. There I said it. Maybe it IS the same fish day after day after day after all! I have no idea after mid July: Not enough data storage under the ol' straw hat to keep all the trout straight. And I have a pretty steel-trap-esque mind for fish and angling moments and it still gets a little worse every season. That is generally the trend, that is the general rule. Rules that usually hold water until, until something changes . . . ..

The river comes alive with bugs. The fish materialize behind every rock stick and shelf to chase them down. A dreary day in the canyon is transformed into a shooting gallery of large trout or as my boys from last week termed it "a dam petting zoo full of trout". How good does it need to be to make two 30+ year fly fishermen start yelling like that?? Very, very good. When client and guide are both throwing hands up praising the river god like this it is a special day indeed.


BLUE MOON INTERLUDE


Needless to say the last four days will be etched into my mind for a very long time. A specific hole on the upper river produced for us some of the best angling moments I have seen in my last 10 years of stalking Montana rivers. Quality fish is what its all about in situations like this, sometimes you land em' and sometimes you don't. Maybe even get a second shot at a giant Brown. Seeing is believing some days and the trout lately have made believers of us all. I was just glad to have hit such good fishing with a couple of my favorite summer visitors to the Bitterroot. Always fun time with this motley crew but this was a trip that we will be talking about for years to come.

There Is a Brown Here. . . 

Keep The Blue Moon Close

Team Sweetgrass looking sharp.

Thankyou Guys! Until Next Time

What Is A Twenty Incher?

It is now that time of year for a gentle critique (takedown!) of one of my pet peeves regarding guides, guiding, and flyfishing in general. Some of you will recognize this as "Sobchaking", some of you just learned a new word. However. Last years rant was directed at fishing fast and all those not Fishing In The Slow Lane. Todays cranky guide rant is on measuring fish. Statistics. Statistics like the very uncomfortable class which I barely survived in college, and which when haphazardly applied to flyfishing is the bain of my and many an "honest" flyfishermans' lives.

After an excellent day on the river last week I was queried as to the biggest fish that my boat caught which then prompted the topic of why I (usually) don't measure fish.  This fellow guide then produced several pictures of fish he had caught himself which had been meticulously taped at between 20 and 25 inches. They were all nice fish, all of which I would describe as large and definitely not your normal specimens, and I would have taken hero pictures with all of them. As to how big they actually were I had to take his word on their specific dimensions as I no longer carry a tape-measure with me on the river and am severely out of practice.

Having a certain kind of temperament and scalpl-edge mind I considered several possibilities:

1) I catch some fish that are bigger than I would guesstimate them to be. Sweet.
2) I am doing my fishing a disservice by by not meticulously recording every trout proportion I can.
3) I catch no large fish.
4) Large fish are only validated by their length.
5) Fishing guides are only validated by catching more big fish than other fishing guides.

Only 1) can be considered a valid and true observation about my experience on the water. All the other reasonable connotations from the measure-net crowd can't hold a lick of water. None. Zilch. Nada.

Am I 20"?

While this individual was merely another example of the Patagucchi trout fishing jockhead I have seen plenty over the years I couldn't help but feel put off by this particular bout of "trout-cocksmanship". Not knowing how big my biggest fish to the net was? How could I call myself a guide! I should just hang up my chacos and join my other favorite bunch of stats padders out on the golf course.

(DO NOT GET ME STARTED ON HANDICAPS! 12 HANDICAP MY ASS ROCKHOLD)

There are several reasons why I choose not to get wrapped in the measure net game. First off, I no longer care how big any particular fish is. There are fish and then there are nice fish. We all know nice fish when we see them, the stacked across the back bodybuilder trout that can be anywhere from a 15 incher all the way up to the true 20+ specimens. Bearing in mind the three stages of fishermen (catch lots of fish; catch big fish; catch lots of big fish / catch certain big fish) I have been in stage 3.2 for some time now, and maybe a side effect of that is a general ambivalence toward big trout stats. Who knows.
Secondly, I prefer to enjoy all of the "nice" fish I catch equally rather than creating a mental hierarchy of enjoyment based on their respective size (which I would have to do if I held firmly to the !@ck measuring formula. I took just enough philosophy to know mutually exclusive conditions when I see them). Thirdly, being a size queen fails to give credit for aspects of certain large fish that make them more memorable than just their gross dimensions; Hooked him in a tough spot, ran downstream almost too fast to contol, "fought beyond his weight", "last-cast fish", ate the smaller frickin fish that i was landing. All these descriptions of great fish have nothing to do with "exactly" how big a fish was. Some giant fish don't fight at all while a smaller fish will do everything he can to take the rod right out of your hand. Some fish are caught while landing other fish! How cool is that! So what that it was "only" a sub-20 inch bull trout.

Nice fish. Still not sure how big he is.

All this is to say that I know a lot of good honest semi-honest fishermen who rarely (if ever) start swinging the 20+ inch benchmark around. I roll my eyes behind thick Costa shades when I hear these numbers blurted out by clients and guides at the end of the day. If we are honest with ourselves those fish are rare on rivers like the Bitterroot and are seen only a handful of times each season. They are not fish that are landed everyday, nor should they be held as a daily expectation. A day with more than one twenty incher isn't "a good day out on the water": That is probably the trip of the year, if not several years. So I will continue to catch nice fish and enjoy them all regardless of disappointing my bloodthirsty trout friends at the brewery end-of-day weigh in. Life is full of opportunities to judge and compare yourself to the achievements of others. I for one would prefer to keep my one true passion in life free from this ego-stroking as long as I can.



Here endith the rant. . .

Coach's Corner "Thor's Bloody Hammer"

Thor’s Bloody Hammer

This blog is a little late but I think you will enjoy it.

                "Tie, tie, tie."  That is the mantra and the routine for this pilgrim as I energetically create what I know, or at least think, will make the trout look up, or tempt the denizen from the deep to chase my offering.  Unlike those "funhogs" that spend their winters chasing elk and fishing far off waters for steelhead, some of us guides actually have jobs in the off season that keep us busy during the long winter months.  And so my bench sees me every day after school or coaching tying at least a couple dozen flies that will keep the clients on fish.  It is much more than just stocking the fly boxes that compel me to tie, it is therapy!  Relaxing with two fingers of Jameson or a glass of wine and my stack of hair and feathers, I perform what has become a healing ritual.

               "What will it be today? " The vice beckons me.  Cripples?  More parachutes?  No, not rubber legs!  I got it!  Streamers, big streamers!  Really big streamers! The kind that make pike take notice.  I’m going to need a big hook and lots of hair, marabou, Zonker strips, and goofy looking bug eyes.  The recipe reveals itself as I start wrapping.  A self-taught tier, with tutoring from a few masters, I begin my creation.

 

So it goes as it has for the past 35 years of tying.  Each wrap holds a piece of feather, some tinsel, peacock hurl, etc.  I like what I am doing.  I can see the pike stalking this fly.  It’s going to need to be heavy.  The next fly is weighted heavy with thick gauged lead.  More hair for volume and marabou, yes, marabou, that will give it life.  What do they eat?  Perch? Sunfish?.... Trout?!!  Oh the thrill.  I must do battle. I am selfish and will not share my trout willingly.  Yes, that looks nice.  I toast myself to the creation and celebrate with Sir Jameson. 

                                                                Pumpkin Seed  Pike fodder!

Two flies and I have been on the vice for half an hour.  Like other fly tiers who think they have the next best fly ever created, I am stingy and selfish, no way am I going to share this fly.  I need at least six of these for this trip.   Vary the color… one should look like a trout, one dark, one bright.  I like this one, I will duplicate it, it will be the lucky fly.  Like so many self-made creations I wonder if there has ever been another like it.  Have I created a truly unique fly?  No of course not!  The methods, techniques and advice from tying sages have influenced its birth but it did come from me and I am the great creator of this fly.  So I shall name it “Thor’s Bloody Hammer”.  Much more masculine and regal than “Cat Vomit”, or “Sex Dungeon”!  Whoa that’s cool! 

Will it fish?

 

 

                                                               It Worked for Bridger

                                                      And For Me!

 

 

                                                                Somewhere near Thompson Falls at dusk