InsideSeam

I fished the upper Madison below McAtee bridge over the weekend. Trout were stacked tight in softer deeper water and willing to eat anything drifting past under a bobber (although, I didn't venture away from a two-nymph settup w/ a girdle bug and either an egg or San Juan worm dropper).

It was cold and windy and our guides were freezing shut. Standard late winter stuff, but conditions should improve shortly.

I've added some shop reports, and we'll try to keep them updated from here on in.

A few photos:

CJ, Pork Tynes, Bob and I made the 3 hour trek out to Fort Smith, in hopes of landing a few nice fish on the Bighorn. Let me start out by saying the "Rez" is a strange place...big trout, but strange.

The forecast looked decent. Partly cloudy, 37-40 degrees, light winds. Hahaha...the weather man was wrong again. It was windy and cold.

We had some good laughs and caught a few trout...nothing huge. Here are a few pix from the trip.

Troy "Pork Tinez" and I fished the Madison below the dam recently and the fish were stacked up like chord wood. So stacked that Troy managed to catch 2 fish on one cast.

He was using a San Juan Worm and dropping a cheese colored egg. Watching him land them was hilarious as the brown was rolling and wrapping himself with the line while the rainbow was jumping. Once he got them to shore he had a good mess on his hands but managed to release them unharmed.

We fished for 2.5 hours and caught over 30 fish between the 2 of us (not including the whitefish and suckers).

And last but certainly not least...the sucker.

Not a bad afternoon for winter time in Montana. If you get out there anytime soon be sure to serve up the ham and eggs.

"Southwest wind between 5 and 11 mph"... mmm hmmm.

Put in at Carter's around 2:45 this afternoon, pulled up to the 9th street ramp around 4:25. There wasn't much water to push us, so the wind picked up the slack.

On the bright side, Greg caught this dark brown a couple hundred yards below the ramp:

It took a brown and orange lead-eye rubberlegged chunk of hardware off the bottom in a slow inside run. Things were looking good, but the afternoon sort of stalled at that point.

We picked up a couple other browns on the strip, as did Mason and Bob in the other boat. In all fairness, the wind was ridiculous and there weren't too many great drifts over the last 4/5 of the float.

I also had a little talk with this honker about a third of the way through:

It turns out that a big white drift boat is the perfect camo for geese hunting on these rivers. This bird and his buddies were posing for another photo op, when I pulled out the ol' 870 wingmaster. I felt a little guilty shooting, but I suppose the education will serve the remainder well once they move out for the season.

Finally, a word of warning, figure out how to split your next Chop House tab before the bill comes. We spent at least 30 min learning the hard way that the staff and credit cards don't get along.

Andre and I shoved off from an empty Warm Springs parking lot around 3:40 and fished into the dark below the highway bridge.

Stripping streamers wasn't producing, but drifting this crayfish pattern got some fish to move:

I heard they were chasing pretty good the other day on the Lower Madison, but were reluctant to commit in the bright sun. It appears that we have a one-day window of 'good' weather coming tomorrow, with more mild mostly sunny days to follow.

In other news:

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: