InsideSeam

Skunked on streamers, worms and small beads for a few hours between the bridge and Black's Ford yesterday.

I heard a 2nd hand report that fish were hitting yellow streamers pretty good earlier in the week.

Looks like some weather may come in tomorrow:

Everything went basically according to plan this weekend - the weather was poor, heads were up, and a few browns were getting after it.

I only had about 90 min of light Friday evening, so I pulled streamers around boulders for a half mile below the Reynolds Pass bridge. I moved about a dozen fish, but didn't hook into anything verifiably noteworthy. There was one little brown that came shooting up through 4' of heavy water to swipe at my natural/yellow double bunny the instant it touched the water, so that was cool.

I hit the river again around 11:00am on Saturday. The temp was in the mid 30's with periods of sun and relative calm between snow squalls. I started the morning fishing a sculpin and beadhead pheasant tail under a bobber. Twenty uneventful minutes later I spotted the first head.

Even with ideal conditions it's not easy to spot risers and keep track of your fly in the riffles and turbulent slicks up there, but the flat light and snow were making it really tough. Still, if you watched carefully, there were fish sipping all over the place. I'm still not sure if they were targeting the few very small mayflies or the even smaller midges, but small to medium trout were pounding anything size 20 or smaller that maintained a dead drift for more than a few seconds.

There were some larger trout porpoising in skinny water just inside the main current, but I was only able to get one take; the heavy rainbow pulled some line and pulled a few aerials before breaking me off.

Anyway, the constant removal of hooks from lips had numbed my fingers, so I decided to switch back to a nymph rig and hope to twitch-n-drift my way into something more substantial. I've landed fish up to 24" in this stretch by high-sticking through the fast pocket water with super heavy flies and a handful of splitshot (although, I'm usually doing it in May or June w/ black rubberlegs). While I didn't land either, that method put me in contact with two really big trout on Saturday. Aside from the treacherous wading, the trouble with fishing big boulder strewn water is that you generally land only a fraction of the fish you stick. In any case, it's worth it to me just to hear my reel scream.

Here are a few other photos from Saturday:

I had hoped to update our reports before heading out for the weekend, but I don't have anything new. For all of you anxiously awaiting our every word, I'm truly sorry.

I'm heading up to fish the Upper Madison and/or Henry's Fork in the snow this weekend. I may shoot a bird or two while I'm at it.

I started to update the shop reports this morning, but since every shop has essentially the same report for every nearby river, I'll just sum it up here: the fishing is generally good; use small BWO dries on cloudy days, two-fly nymph rigs w/ big-ugly/beadhead when they're not rising, or swing for the fences by stripping streamers.

Also, here's my photo-excuse for not fishing this weekend:

We hit the Yellowstone from Grey Owl to Mallard's Rest today. The fishing kept us entertained, if just barely. Most of the day was spent bobber fishing w/ big uglies (bow river bugger, double bunny, zonker, halloween bugger, etc.) and a small nymph (serendipity, copper john, prince, pt, etc.). Those rigs brought a bunch of whitefish to the boat, as well as a few trout; both fish seemed to like both flies better on the strip. We didn't boat anything spectacular, but we did lose a couple big browns and a couple unseen fish that were pulling hard.

It was sunny most of the day, so the beatis thing wasn't really happening. We spotted several pods of risers but, once again, they were dominated by Louie Lips. The best we could do on dries was a few medium sized cutties.

Here are a couple marginal shots from today. I recently bought the waterproof Olympus 790SW for fishing photos, and I'm still figuring it out...

She's flowing low and slow, so it may be a good idea to shorten up your floats and spend any extra time hunting heads.

Also, for the cast 'n blast crowd, Anthony connected with a passing honker early and I jumped a blue-wing teal a bit later.

Twice in the past week I've found myself holding a fly-rod - October 1st on the lower Madison and yesterday on the Yellowstone. Both reports are essentially the same: we found pods sipping small dries (beatis and/or midges), but couldn't get the big stuff to work.

The 'highlight' of streamer fishing was snagging this little guy out of the boat ramp foam line:

As far as regular fishing reports go, I can't really commit just yet. I'll do what I can (e.g. see updated Shop Reports), but I have many other fall responsibilities that require attention.

Specifically, while I'm done chasing elk for the year...

...I drew a once-a-decade deer tag that I'd rather not eat...

...and pheasant season opens this Saturday:

Anyway, thanks for your patience. In the future, I'll try not to neglect the trout - they deserve better.