Sunday, March 30, 2014

Streamer Time!

First things first; I need to make a correction. I wrote about fishing the Yellowstone last weekend and said we fished from Palisades to Pine Creek. That would be pretty tough since you'd have row up over a pass to get from the Madison to the Yellowstone...plus a pretty monstrous portage. What we actually did was Loch to Pine Creek--a much more doable float.

We hit the Stone again yesterday. Looking at the weather, we knew we were going to have some pretty sever winds. It was confirmed on the drive over when the marque updating the weather coming down the pass was diverting semi traffic off the interstate through Livingston. Our original plan was to float through town but with the wind we decided to head up the canyon a little to try to get out of it. So we headed up to Pine Creek and floated down to Carter's Bridge.


The fishing was more than ok as the browns were definitely hungry and looking for big bright and shiny stuff. The ones that might have been a little picky were more than willing to eat a trailing black bugger. We moved a ton of fish and landed a bunch even with a downstream wind propelling us past the foam at times, too fast to get much more than a fleeting shot. When we could hold in the soft water, low and slow and let it troll was pretty effective. However, the biggest fish of the day was actually caught by Charles while swinging a streamer in a faster riffle just downstream from a pool.

With Nathaniel sending an arrant cast into the top of a tree late in the day, he decided to get a little Western with his next choice of fly. Check this out. The streamer is about half the size of the brown  that ate it. He actually moved a few more with it. It reminds me of the little snake pike we used to catch on the biggest Dare Devil we could find, trolling behind the Grumman when we were kids.


The wind was pretty ridiculous at times but we made the best of it. We got off without wrecking and caught plenty of nice browns with a smattering of rainbows to mix in. We only picked up the nymph rods once while parked on a dump below a riffle and caught a couple but with streamer action like this, why would you chase bobbers?

Keep 'em where they live...

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