The Mo dropped from 16,200 cfs to 15,900 yesterday...woo whoo! A lot of people are scared off by high water but you can still catch fish; just not on top. You have to go deep and you have to find them. Once you do, good days are to be had but just remember, the Mo is the only show in town right now and everybody is watching.
I fished the same group Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I took the fathers out the first and third days and the boys, (who are in their forties,) on day two. Knowing there are plenty of options to get out of heavy current between Wolf Creek and Craig, that's where we fished on Friday and Saturday. Friday was pretty tame and we got plenty of fish. Most of the dudes out there were guides and we did everything we could to keep to ourselves and when we had to, share the road on the row-arounds. Saturday was a totally different ball game.
We put in early and fished down to the Little Prickly Pear riffle. It's a relatively easy row-around, fishing the inside-out method, casting into the riffle with the bank to your back and floating down a hundred yards or so and rowing back up. We stuck a couple fish right away and within about 15 minutes, had six boats in that run, all trying to do the same thing and pretty much fucking it up for everyone. Pete Skidmore and I were the first boats in there but we bailed to the other side of the river, fishing the soft edge of the inside bend and all those bastards followed us over there. They saw us hook up a few times and jumped in on the same lines. I stuck it out thinking people would take a couple fish and move down but it didn't happen. They parked on that run too. I got tired of it and crossed the river for the first of many channels we would try to hide in.
We found a run and hit it a few times hooking up every time through. I kept an eye on our back side and every time we saw a boat come through the channel, we would slide over and park and just them go by. There was one other boat a little down stream that was doing the same thing. Nobody else was fishing where the fish were and since we didn't give them the lines, they would drift through and not hook up and just keep going. Once they passed, we would slide out and do it all over again until the next boat came.
We did this most of the way to Craig, getting bumped out of some runs and having rafts follow us everywhere we went until we got to the Sterling Channel. We wanted to get out of the bumper boats so we took a chance on making it through the channel. There's a bridge half way down and now I know that with my boat, 16,200 cfs is that absolute highest the water can be and still make it under the bridge. We actually had to put all of us in the front of the boat in order to drop the height of the bow enough to slide under. The pay-off was fishing is solitude for a while and finishing the day strong.
Sunday I took the old guys down to Cascade. Again, a huge risk with the water as high as it is because all the riffles and islands disappear. The pay-off is sometimes you get into huge browns and you don't see anyone for miles. We didn't actually put a fish in the boat however, for about the first 2 1/2 hours. It's the worst feeling in the world knowing we could have gone back to the boat show between the bridges and caught fish but instead, we chose the dead sea of Pelican to Cascade and now we're getting our asses handed to us.
At around 1pm, we rowed into a slough, found some shade and ate lunch. While sitting there listening to the guys talk, I watched the water pulsing back and forth, picking up debris and dumping into the main channel. There was so much crap in the water; sticks, twigs, dead grass and worms...
We changed our approach after lunch. It's not that we hadn't been fishing the worm until then but we definitely weren't fishing the right water. With so much high water, the islands were being scoured and tons of worms were getting dumped into runs and the fish were gorging on them. We started really getting them; big fat happy fish. I set one down on the cooler to measure it and it puked up a worm and took a big crap. Disgusting but validating.
The Cascade run is definitely not for the weak. It can be very frustrating. Fish can be fickle and hard to find. Yesterday paid off. My dudes were happy and although it was a lot of work, it was worth it.
Keep 'em where they live...
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