Still spending time in Bozeman and still exploring water I haven't really fished much before. Scott, Jill's neighbor and I, headed up the Gallatin yesterday to give a look-see. I read the reports and figured we wouldn't be doing much in the way of throwing dries so when we parked the truck, I stuffed a few nymph boxes in my pack and headed down to the river.
I sat in a run for a while, hooking up on some small rainbows. At some point my little black WD-40 lost it's wing casing so I sat down to tie another one on. I caught something out of the corner of my eye land on my leg and when I looked down I saw one of these guys; a skwala!
I've talked to a couple locals down here and after looking at the reports, I didn't think the Gallatin had skwalas. I never thought to bring any but after a few hours of hooking 12 inch rainbows on a nymph rig, I figured it was well worth the trek back up to the truck to bust out the big stuff.
Scott had walked up stream and saw some fish rising but he didn't bring any dries with him either so when we met up again after grabbing the necessary ammo, he brought me back to where these fish were. They were rising just behind a rock along a mid-river reef of rocks, which required a little thinking before sending a fly into the flat water without dragging the rest of your line down stream in the faster current. They were also eating some pretty small bugs--either tiny black stones or midges--so we watched them for a while before tying something on.
Had I been guiding, I probably would have gone with something I had some confidence in like a Parachute Adams with a either a Griffith's gnat or some other midge pattern as a dropper but I saw that skawala and I like to experiment. How else will you figure new things out right? So I rifled through my box of stones and came across a fly I tied almost eight years ago for Pat Straub.
The fly is kind of like a bugmeister but this one was tied for a "one-fly" contest for Pat on the South Fork of the Salmon. It was tied more to be completely bomb-proof than it was to catch fish. I wasn't very confident it would work because I had just started tying when Pat asked me to tie it so although he offered me like 50 bucks, I couldn't bring myself to take his money. But now it was just sitting in the box after all these years screaming at me, "Pick me! Pick me!" So I tied it on and dropped a little WD-40 behind it.
I waded into the heavy current positioning myself to get a good shot at the flat water where the fish were rising. They weren't real consistent but every once in a while you could see a nose come up and sometimes one would get a little aggressive and move some water. I stripped out some line and started throwing some false casts well up stream from the seam.
Once I got enough line out I sent a cast just behind the rock creating the seam and reached up stream as the fly was falling, trying to get enough slack in the line to get a decent drift. On that first cast a nice rainbow completely annihilated the bugmeister and as I almost always do, being completely out of practice after a winter of nymphs and streamers; I jerked it out of his mouth.
In a very short period of time, I had three really nice fish eat that big bug, which tells me that they were looking for the skwalas. I think that's pretty cool since the Gallatin isn't known for skwalas. It just goes to show, you have to be ready for just about anything when fishing the small waters in the West.
Keep 'em where they live...
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