Finding Fish and the Stink Eye
Intense days of rain rather than the cooler fall days have moved fish from their regular holding spots. River flows are high for this time of year and in some ways, it feels like spring run-off season, which causes you to retreat to places like the spring creeks in Livingston or Hyalite Creek to catch Cutthroats. Morning, afternoons and evenings didn’t seem to provide any clues when fish could be caught. Normal areas where you would have 12-15 fish on the line, where stingy with maybe one fish for your efforts and somedays none. River talk is blaming climate change, fishing pressure and land development as the culprits. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks is also taking the heat for mismanagement of the fisheries and has commissioned muti-year studies of those rivers damaged the worst such as the Big Hole to determine the underlying causes.
Yet we found them. Downriver from Gallatin Gateway numerous afternoons were spent netting 11-12 inch rainbows with bigger browns and rainbow trout to be caught. Cloudy days brought the fish to the surface in greater frequency and one afternoon was a particular frenzy. Many times multiple fish were eyeing the same dry fly. If the first fish missed it, the second one was there to take it. Sunny days lent themselves to more nymphing with long drops. Big fish in the range of 15-17 inches would come to the net with the nymph tucked in the side of their mouth. Smaller rainbows also participated chasing nymphs.
The Lower Madison was also doing well. From the boat, browns predominated the day along with the occasional rainbow. We didn’t rush the day; the sun shined all the way from our put-in at Warm Springs to Black’s Ford.
Yet our float on the Lower Madison earned us the stink-eye of a few guides when we put-in. Trailering a drift boat at the ramp and launching it is not the same as your 18-foot lake boat. For starters a drift boat trail has rollers allowing you to roll the boat into the water. Mistakes started popping up when trying to place the trailer too far into the water to have it float release. A key element to this mistaken approach is potentially submerging the trailers electrical connection which would cause bigger problems. Fortunately, one of guides yelled at us with instructions to go no further, come back up the ramp and then roll the boat off the trailer.
In life it is best not to take oneself too seriously, learn from your mistakes and later laugh about your experiences – which we did. This is not to say we didn’t also do a couple of 360’s in the water as we wandered down the river that day, while also catching the occasional rock underneath the boat. It was a beautiful day on the Lower Madison, sunny and 60 degrees and we relished the experience. We will do it again.
