How's the fishing?

We worked pretty hard for the fish we caught the past couple days. Here's Shawn Gallaty with the final fish of the trip--a nice brown caught on a size 18 parachute Adams.

What!?

You read it right. A dry fly and a parachute Adams, which means a couple things. 1) Regardless of what you hear, there is some dry fly fishing right now on the Mo, even with the flows getting up to 9,000 cfs. 2) There are just enough BWO's to get fish to look for them. There's not a lot but just enough.

The flows yesterday, went up to 9,200 cfs. That's about 3,500 cfs higher than normal for this time of the year. The assumption is that you'd have to go deep and slow and throw wire worms and hot beads in order to catch fish. It is true that we did get some fish that way but Shawn was here to see what the Mo is all about and to learn a little bit about trout fishing tail waters. He's very experienced at throwing streamers for stripers and trout fishing the freestones in the mountains but never had this kind of opportunity so we went seeking out the Missouri trifecta. That's not rainbow, brown, and white; folks. It's nymph, streamers, and dries. 

Like I said, the assumption for this time of the year and this level of water flowing on the Mo, is deep and slow. Throw anything pink or hot bead behind a wire worm, under a big bobber and you'll catch fish and you will but it's definitely not your only option and might not even be your best. You have to know what to look for and you have to show some patience but you can find fish like the one in the photo that aren't hanging out in ten feet of water off a ledge. 

We started out with the Mo dredging rig...we weren't crushing it. We started experimenting with streamers and shallow rigs and we were pleasantly surprised. The thing is, with these flows and the fact that a lot of rainbows are doing their thing up the tribs, some of the best fish left are actually getting pushed right up along the banks. There's food there and they can get out of the main current and they are more opportunistic. They'll eat the big uglies so switching to streamers actual produced some really good takes. Although we didn't crush them, the action was decent and we were able to complete the second leg of the trifecta. 

In the afternoon we noticed noses coming up. They were pretty random and in tough spots but it was something we thought would be at least fun to try. Let me tell you, those fish are hungry and they will eat if you can get to them. The first time Shawn got a fly over one of those fish, that brown absolutely annihilated it and the trifecta was complete. Nice work, Shawn. We will definitely see you out here again.

Keep 'em where they live...