Something out of nothing

I hadn't planned on writing anything about my last trip. There wasn't much to it.  But then I realized what I had just done was the very thing this blog promotes and encourages.  Always travel with fishing gear: Be prepared and grab an opportunity to fish somewhere new, even if just briefly and opportunistically. I learned some new water, took notes for next time, and caught fish in the process.

Travel for work took me along the Clark Fork in Western Montana. I've never fished it that I recall. Maybe a cast or two at some point. A fly rod and a couple spinning rods were at the ready in the back seat.  The first evening I had about an hour of daylight remaining as I intersected the river on my way to a hotel for the night. I strung up a long spinning rod - anticipating trout and expecting to benefit from the extra reach in the swift, big water - and slid down a bank under one of the numerous I-90 bridges. I readily picked up some chunky pikeminnows, watched twin whitetail fawns play like kids, saw an osprey grab a fish, and marveled at a glowing rainbow on the tail end of a passing storm. After 30 minutes I eased on down the road and dropped in again a couple miles downriver. I caught a feisty 16-inch rainbow and a few more pikeminnows. The rainbow nailed a jig along a rock wall sloping back under my feet.

The next day I was much further downstream, down in a warmer water fishery, and found myself with about another hour of available time. I beat around trying to find access and bailed out in a likely looking place where ownership was apparently public. This time with a shorter spinning rod for working topwaters and jerking jigs in slower water.  I targeted smallmouth bass and caught several smaller ones. Nothing over a half pound. Pike were in the back of my mind, but I never saw any. I was fishing a 4lb mono but had a spare spool filled with a super line I could swap out if pike showed up.


I started out with a good "attractor" jig that would generate hits from anything I expected to be here - bass, pike, maybe trout. Once the smallmouth showed their presence, I switched to a Heddon Torpedo to force some surface bites. Had some of my first topwater bass action in quite some time.

I switched back to a jig when I came across a nice run with some depth that was begging to be probed.  I bounced bottom with some slow rolls of a 1/16th-ounce bait. Slow water, slow flutter with a lightweight lure.  I felt a big pick-up on the end of a drop, ensured tension contact, and set the hook into some poundage. The fish stayed put, then throbbed with pulsing thrashes of a fish with heft and length. It didn't take off in a blistering run like the bass or pike I was anticipating. Brown trout crossed my mind, but when I saw the trademark white tip on the tail I realized my quality walleye streak was continuing.

I fished a total of a couple hours within a 24-hour window. Caught four species. Caught what I targeted and some bonuses. Was blessed with a surprise trophy.

I could have simply driven by. But that's not me. True to form I squeezed in an opportunity and capitalized on it. It panned out in big ways. I saw new beautiful places. I breathed in the smell of forest and river - a break from the hum of tires on the road.  And now there are a couple more places in my hit-list for later, with some ideas of species to target - along with other gorgeous water I drove by and drooled over but didn't get to sample that's now tucked away into memory.

Fish much?

To all my fishing buds throughout this great nation and to readers here at home, north of the border, and across the ocean - many of you will identify. And the rest of you, well, you know who you are...

I'm asked all the time - "How do you fish so much?" Usually the person asking has a sort of sulking demeanor with a hint of self pity about them as the words roll off their tongue. Maybe they don't even say it out loud, or in those exact words, but the message is conveyed loud and clear.

That's a puzzling question really. I didn't know that I did fish all that much. It doesn't feel like I do. I certainly don't go half as much as I want to. I can't imagine I've got rod in hand more than a typical fisherman who has their priorities in line.  I've got the usual constraints keeping me off the water - a family to raise, a day job, my wife's jam-packed calendar, hunting seasons, ice, etc.

I want to ask in return "why do you just WISH you fished this much?"

Do something about it.  Look for opportunity. Make it happen. Mark the full moons on the calendar. Make plans to leave early or to come home late. It doesn't have to be anything more than whatever is available. A bluegill caught by the fountain of a city park before starting the daily grind is time well spent.  Toss a trot line in the river and swing by to check it on the way home.

I truly don't fish much, at least not by my definition of "much." Perhaps more than the regular license holder, but certainly not nearly as much I'd like, or nearly as much as I could handle, or even as much as in my more care-free past. Some people think I live on the water. My wife is likely among them, although I suspect she's blotted the pre-kid days from her memory.  Fishing is like food - just grab a snack when you're hungry.  You gotta eat.  And eating always seems to happen.  Fishing can 'just happen' too.  People can't make it a week without a favorite TV show... yet complain from the couch that they don't get to fish often.

I've lived in lots of places across the country.  Fishing opportunities were different in every spot - but I capitalized on what there was to offer.  That much hasn't ever changed.  Those orchestrated opportunistic and somewhat random opportunities include trout and smallmouth in North Carolina, largemouth, white bass, and redfish in Texas, steelhead and salmon in Washington, trout and pike in Montana - plus a multitude of visited spots and vacations in between where fishing wasn't the purpose of the trip but got squeezed in - bass and snook in Florida, flounder in South Carolina, carp in flooded timber, trout at summer camp, bluegill anywhere, bowfin in coastal swamps, creek chubs in urban streams, brookies in Colorado, pickerel in a Piedmont creek, rainbows in South Dakota, white bass and buffalo in the Great Lakes, browns in Michigan, trout and bass in Georgia, browns in Wyoming, crappie in Pennsylvania... and so on.  I'm NOT talking about planned events penciled onto calendars that you look forward to for weeks on end.  Those trips exist too.  I'm talking solely  about the trips inserted into regular life.  Spontaneousness.  Or at least semi-spontaneousness. 

I do catch some pretty awesome fish.  The screensaver on my computer gets longer all the time. But the thing about it is, half of those fish were caught on opportunistic trips.  Planning may be involved, but I'm catching fish on hour-long deviations here and there.  Of course I find them on actual day-long or multiday fishing adventures, but all those "extra" stolen opportunities add up.  Give me six or eight quick trips during a prime month on prime water to one day-long trip anytime. One of those quick trips will line up with ideal conditions, and casts made will always be to the best spots. Trips once a month or a handful of times a year don't amount to much. Rarely do they fully overlap ideal conditions - clarity, weather, moon, hatches, etc. Don't tell me you've never checked in at the local bait or fly shop to jump start your 'trip of the year' and heard "Should have been here last week."  And if you're not keeping your finger on the pulse of what's going on with the waters you fish, then likely you'll spend a chunk of your once-in-a-blue-moon fishing trip figuring things out.  Not to mention you'll just be plain rusty.  Any skill takes practice.  Any workout requires reps for results. They say even a blind hog finds an acorn on occasion - but if that hog checks the same tree on a frequent basis he's going to find more than one.  He might even discover that little divet at the bottom of the hill where acorns seem to collect.

What am I saying? I'm saying Always travel with fishing gear. If fishing isn't your thing (which I have no idea why you'd be reading this if that's the case), then pack along the equipment needed to do whatever IS your "thing."  Hiking boots. A camera. Your bike. Heaven forbid a game boy.  If I were a golfer, I'd be driving balls off scenic overlooks. Perhaps your 'equipment' is simply a book. Readers seem to have this licked - they always produce a book out of nowhere and read it in any spare moment - in the bank drive-through line, waiting for kids, during lunch, on the can - you name it. They don't whine about not having time, they just plow through book after book as life goes on.

If you want to fish, pack your stuff. Always. View daily life as an opportunity yet to be discovered like the readers do. Pull over at bridge crossings. Don't have your gear? Shame on you. At least spend five minutes putting your polarized glasses (or squinty eyes) to work. You might see something useful for next time - actual observed water levels to compare to USGS flow graphs, crawdads on the bottom, a bunch of insect shucks, a weedline, rising trout, a hatch, a deep hole, a spray of fleeing baitfish, structure, a bass suck in a frog. There's just no telling.

You do have your gear, but no time? Cast anyway! Even if its just twice. See if you get a follow or a looker. What was it? Did you just learn something?
So many times I've done this in a fishery where I wasn't sure what it supported, or in a place where I wondered if maybe I was too far below a dam in a tailwater for trout to be there. Five minutes of ripping a plug or swinging a fly and I see a rainbow swipe and miss. Maybe a brown followed or I hooked a 6-inch smallmouth.  Time to head back to the truck and get on down the road, but I'm armed with info for a later trip. They're there!....

If you've got time at all, jet down a side road and look for an access point for future. Mentally map out some floats or hikes.  Better yet, scribble on a map, take gps points. Build a catalog of spots you can hit. Some you can hit more often than others. Some you simply need to pull off at routinely, like you do at your favorite gas station or coffee shop. 10 minutes under a bridge isn't going to kill anybody's schedule. Neither will 45 minutes most of the time. 

Ignore the weather, and by that I mean go no matter what. You can take those 10 minutes under a bridge in the freezing cold, or getting poured on, or getting pelted by mosquitoes. 

Fair weather fishing equates to barely ever fishing.

Its absolutely fine if none of this appeals to you. No sense in doing something you don't enjoy. But at the same time, don't whine about how you never get to go. Just enjoy when you do, or when you choose to. I've been called crazy a thousand times for what I'll endure and what I'll finagle to carve out some fishing time. But if that's not your style, then you can hardly complain that I fish more than you. The truth is, I do the same thing you do. I look around and see folks who appear to live on the water and have all the luck - sponsors, world travel, writing gigs, guiding connections, TV shows, blogs with actual reader traffic. 

And then I whine. Just like you.

The hot days of winter

Lately my free time has been poured into hunting season. Elk, antelope, and deer called me away from water for most of three months.  During that time I think I fished only four times. For me that's not much, although one trip resulted in one of my biggest browns to date. A post-spawn bruiser hooked in moonless blackness.
November and hunting season wrapped up with temps around zero. But with the first week of December came a warm-up to near freezing. And field work was on my calendar.  Which means travel.  Which means passing water. And this time of year, it means water void of people. And I can't pass water without stopping....
I needed to head north along the Missouri for field meetings the following day. So, with half a work day behind me and four hours of driving time ahead, I hit the river while en-route for the last couple hours of ever-shortening daylight. The water was steely perfect, and no one was around. I couldn't quite tear my eyes off the hillsides since they'd been glued there for three months scanning for animals, so I wore my binos and checked out the deer as they appeared. After all, the rut was still peaked. And sometimes bighorn sheep show up.

The air temp was just high enough that ice on the line and in the eyelets was not a problem. I got to work swinging jigs and searching out the type of runs they were holding in. I was cutting the first tracks in snow that was days old and frozen to a hard crust.  I was on a stretch that would be crawling with folks in the summer months. The sub-aqueous grass that plagues fisherman summer and fall was all but gone. I slipped along ticking bottom and popping jigs till I found myself in a deeper run and setting into my first hookup. Doesn't matter the time of year, nice trout always enjoy a fat minnow. But now the water was cold enough that even these larger ones were feeding midday and the lethargy of summer was gone. Each fish of any size peeled drag and pumped the rod with spunk I hadn't felt since about March. Funny, everyone flocks

to the river as some of the best fishing is ending, and then go home again about the time it picks back up. Summer is convenient when it comes to hatching bugs and warm fingers, but it's kind of a bummer in terms of pursuing big fish and a heavy fight. At least during daylight hours.

The fish were picking up the jig in subtle but solid unmistakable taps. I'd cast far enough upstream to gain the depth I needed by the time the jig was passing me. Then I'd swing it like a streamer, but also bounce bottom and sometimes feed it line to increase its travel time through the strike zone at depth.
It was hot! The only other guy I saw was a duck hunter. The biggest fish were rainbows. The browns seemed to be holding in swifter water today. At least the ones I hooked into. Ducks whizzed up and down the river, their wings screaming as they careened by. The occasional shotgun blast rolling through the canyon walls.  Geese honked as they passed overhead in stringy viceroys. Bald eagles circled and perched, eyeing equally the river and the cawing crows. And the deer on the ridges kept my binoculars busy. The draw of glassing for antlers doesn't diminish even after the tag is filled.
I could have just driven by like everyone else and camped out in my hotel room earlier, but packing a rod and a box of jigs was my ticket to a beautiful evening full of late fall/early winter action. And I don't just mean the fish.

As darkness fell the temperature started its dip to single digits for the night. Still, it was hard to leave.  Only nine months left to fish before next hunting season.

Little Pike on the Prairie

I just finished up a week of travel. Work took me up north of Helena towards the Canadian line, across the hi-line to the North Dakota border, then swung me south through the Terry badlands, Billings, and back to Helena. Thunder storms and flash floods ruled out fishing any southeastern Montana waters. For a normal person mosquitoes would have ruled out fishing any of the northern waters. But being me, I
suited up in a hat and gloves (because that's all I had) and stuck it out.  The first night was four hours of swatting, snorting, grimacing, smearing bloody bug guts, and, well, fish.  And it was worth it - I kicked things off on the first evening and on the first river with a decent little walleye, followed by a rainbow, then a pretty nice pike, and then a solid brown.  I  rolled a heavy fish that I tried to tell myself may simply have been a carp that I bumped, but my gut said it was the big brown I envisioned occupying that hole.  And the hit came right when it "should have."  A previous trip two years earlier had produced an 8-pound brown from the same deep bend.

By the end of the evening, I'd caught and released multiples of each species.  There was a flurry of action from half a dozen small walleye right at dusk, and as darkness fell I turned my attention full-on to pike. It has been years since I had some good top water action, and it was a blast drawing some vicious strikes on top water plugs and buzzbaits.
I hate to say that I landed none on the buzzbaits, only the plugs,
but I did thoroughly enjoy the three ferocious hits that slammed the gurgling lure, plus one follower that looked like Nemo's submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  By 11p.m. I decided it was time to pry myself off the water if I was going to be fit for work the following morning.

Two evenings later I met pike again, this time on a remote prairie stream along the Canadian border.  I gambled that it might hold pike, and sure enough, it did.  As pike go, they were pretty little.  Classic hammer handles some of them.  But considering the water, they were huge, at least to me. The stream was little more than a proverbial "babbling brook" - and it was actually rocky and clear. I stopped at the first stream crossing I came to.  The clear water emerged from a channel choked with reeds, formed a small pool where it backed up behind the culvert and road fill, and then spilled through to the other side.  Not much to work with, but I was excited at how clear it was.  Most anything else I'd crossed over in the previous couple days was muddy.  I tossed a #11 Rapala across the hole and pumped it back along a submerged weed line.  The cast was barely more than 30 feet.  The entire stream disappeared under the road through a partly-filled 24-inch culvert. But under the glare of the reflected bluffs around me was the distinct rush of fish, coming on a collision course.  It missed.  A cloud of mud passed by.  A quick repeat cast produced a follow, but not a strike.  My first thought was "YES! Pike are HERE!"  My second was "Man, I can't believe a pike would let a meal like that just pass on by in such small water. He can't afford to be picky."  He may have gone 20 inches - not much for a pike, but big when I think he could have gotten wedged between the banks where the stream entered the hole if he turned sideways.  By now I'd gathered a quite a herd of curious cows.  Much better than the mosquitoes of the previous evening.  The fish wouldn't fall for anything else, and I drew only one other strike from a much smaller fish up at the head of the pool.  But I was energized.  Fish were here.  I already felt like I'd conquered the stream just for having found it, deduced from a map that it would be one that should hold pike,and then drawing a strike from one on my first cast.

I moved ahead to the next crossing a few miles further upstream and was greeted by the welcome sight of a large hole weaving among prairie grasses that was spanned by an old timber railroad trestle, the peeled logs from a century ago glowing in the evening sun.  The hole yielded half a dozen pike that decided to join me on shore for a photo op.  It produced three times that many strikes, and even stole off with a Rapala or two, despite my use of a super line and having removed the front trebles, forcing the hookup to occur at the rear of the lure where teeth would be away from the line.
A sandy haired young man rolled his ranch pick-up to a stop to check out what I was up to.  We shook hands over the rifle in his front seat and exchanged names and a few lines.  He was obviously intrigued to find anyone fishing, and probably intrigued that it wasn't anyone he knew.  How could a stranger have stumbled across this water?  He didn't know much about what lived in the stream, although I got the impression he'd lived his life along it.  He gave me the phone number of an area landowner who would grant access to larger stretches of the stream than just these crossings I was fishing, and I logged it away for future reference.  It was unfortunately too late in the evening to be bothering anybody.  I probably

didn't have enough light left to even fish more than one other hole.  The heavy Scandinavian accent, narrow glasses, and wool cap made the man seem out of place in his truck.  His whole demeanor would have been better placed in a wagon behind a team of horses.  He really didn't seem much removed from the pioneers who'd settled the land a century earlier, at least my mental picture of them anyway, which was largely drawn from the pages of Laura Ingalls Wilder that my wife and I have been reading to our kids lately.  And in a way, I suppose he wasn't.  My own family can be traced in part to subsequent voyages of the same Mayflower that brought the Pilgrims, and we have scattered about the country in the three hundred years since.  Here is a land settled really only a short time ago.  Sometimes the tipi rings observed on a prairie bluff look like they were left there only as long ago as the abandoned homestead cabins scattered among the creek bottoms.


The third piece of water I fished was the Fort Peck Dam. Walking the huge rip rap along the lake side in summer can produce some good smallmouth action, along with the occasional walleye and pike as well.  I was a tad too early in the year, but I got to check "smallmouth bass" off the list for spring of 2014.  I caught very few fish overall, and most were pretty small.  Another three weeks and it probably would have been just about right.  Still, I got to scratch the smallmouth itch.  At least a little bit.

Film Canisters and Cane Poles: a fly history

I was at a local farm pond fishing for bass and bluegill. I was probably 12 years old. It was summer, school was out, and I'd ridden my bike to meet a friend of mine. That friend, David Sorrells, still lives in that warm green Appalachian valley in North Carolina and is in his first season of tournament bass fishing as a 'pro' angler. I would undoubtedly be in his boat right now had I not gone on the life adventure of living several places around the country.  We fished a tournament or two together in the past, and it was a ton of fun.

David is responsible for many "starts" in my fishing - grafts that branched beyond what my dad and I already did. He introduced me to taking trout on plugs. I can still feel the emotion that the amazement caused in me when I saw him take a brown on a #11 original Rapala from a knee-deep riffle on a tiny stream. Until that moment I still thought a #2  Vibrax was too large.  He talked me into buying a #11 original off a shelf in Bethel Grocery that morning as we headed up river. It had rained early that morning, and the browns would be on the prowl.  I remember the first fish that nailed it. Turned out to be a smallmouth, my first ever of any real size, and in that moment two new passions were born - plug fishing and the pursuit of smallmouth bass.

That day on the farm pond David showed up with a fly rod. I'm not sure I'd ever seen one before, at least not up close. As a kid, I thought people sailed a fly around in the air to make it look like a real bug to the fish. That it was the "flying" and landing, like a house fly on the kitchen table, which was the reason for the gear and the swirling casts.  But that day I learned what it was really all about as I discovered casting weightless lures. Watching bluegill inhale bugs, both surface and subsurface, will hook anyone. And at 12 years old, it was magical. I have a memory from that day of a bluegill edging out of the grass to intersect a wet fly I was steering back to the bank. I saw him suck it in without getting all the way to it, like he'd reached out and taken it with an invisible straw.  In that moment my fishing was taken to an entirely new level - I suddenly knew more, and I thought about lure presentation differently from then on.

For days and probably weeks after I bugged my dad endlessly about getting a fly rod.  He was reluctant, because it would mean having to take me, and he would rather spend our fishing time together launching the boat in various lakes than untangling my fly line from anything and everything on waters he wasn't that interested in fishing anyway.  I don't know how much time passed, probably years even. I fly fished with David's gear occasionally. Then one day I saw a boy fly fishing with a cane pole. Just a line tied to the tip, the same length as the rod.  This isn't an unusual way to fly fish in the Southern Appalachians, at least traditionally (and its making a comeback of sorts nationwide as a "Japanese" style of flyfishing - the tenkara rod), but for some reason I hadn't encountered it yet. I also don't know why it hadn't already clicked in my brain all on its own - I never went anywhere without a film canister wrapped in fishing line with split shot and hooks inside, much to the delight of folks in parks and other places. I remember one lady at the Biltmore Estate watching me hoist

bluegills out from under a gazebo, using strips of white lichen from the the boards as bait, twitched subtly under the surface.  She was convinced she'd be seeing me on a fishing show in a few years.

When utilizing my canister I'd either toss hand lines rigged with whatever bait I found or I'd fashion a rod from a likely looking limb. "Always travel with fishing gear" has always been my motto.   Why I'd never thought to simply put a fly on the end of that line I don't know, but now the idea had spawned and my film canister would never be the same.  I made myself a cane pole fly rod from a piece of bamboo I cut from a roadside patch and drug home behind my bike. It wasn't long before one day I saw cane poles in a bait shop that had been modified to break down into two sections (I'm talking worm and bobber cane pole). A light bulb went off. I don't remember how I got that rod - probably dumped my piggy bank out and paid in nickels - but a two-piece cane pole came home soon after. I rummaged in the basement and found some fine, stiff wire. After drilling holes through the rod incrementally, I passed the wire through and fashioned eyelets, lashing them where I folded the wire over on the back of the cane.  The rod tip eyelet was the base of a safety pin I bummed off my mom. My dad gave me an ancient fly reel he dug out of the attic loaded with a cotton line.  I lashed it to the base of the rod. Suddenly I was in business - I had a castable fly rod. David kept me supplied with flies he'd made and taught me to make some myself.  I was inseparable from that rod. Heavy and stiff as it was it went with me everywhere. And it caught a ton of fish. A ton.  It fished lakes and creeks on family camping trips and outings. It fished the Little East Fork all week long at Camp Daniel Boone where I went as a Boy Scout each summer.

Then one day, with some birthday money in my pocket, I came across a rack of bright yellow Eagle Claw Featherlight fly rods in a hardware store in Hazelwood.  For $20 I bought a 7-foot thing of beauty. My first "real" fly rod. With the flex that it had I could work magic in a cast. I sprung for a Martin reel and an actual

fly line a little while later and became unstoppable. After using that piece of cane for so long I could truly make this rod work for me.
(And apparently these rods still have a following today.  I had to dig mine out of the closet after writing about it, just to feel the old thing again.  Might have to introduce it to some cutthroat this summer - it certainly hasn't seen the light of day in more than 15 years, and has never met a cutthroat.)

Right before college I pooled some money I'd gotten for high school graduation and outfitted myself with one of Redington's early rods - back when the guy still basically made them in his garage and hadn't sold the company yet.  I'd been trying out rods in the parking lot at Roger Lowe's fly shop for a long time.  That rod has followed me everywhere from that moment on, and I'm yet to replace it.  It has taken trout in every tributary on the North Carolina side of the Smoky Mountains and in nearly every stream within a 50 mile radius of Haywood County (and in the Appalachians, 50 miles is a lot - both in distance and in amount of water). Its taken trout in Colorado, Tennessee, Georgia, South Dakota, Washington, Montana, and probably other places I've forgotten about. It has taken largemouth from Mattamuskeet in coastal North Carolina to Texas. It has even targeted creek chubs in a suburban Ohio stream and taken steelhead (yup, it's just an 8-foot 5-weight) in Washington.  And of course a few smallmouth bass along the way.
People give me grief for targeting big trout with spinning gear, as if I were being unfaithful to my fly rod, or leaving my kids on somebody's doorstep.  I don't mind.  I am a fisherman, not just a fly fisherman, and there's no way they could know the richness that fishing of all sorts has brought to my life.

Before work

I'm a big proponent of doing whatever your passion is during whatever moments you can squeeze it into your day.  Its what makes you you.  Fishing is no different for me.  Some of my best fish have come on those summer mornings when its light enough to see by 4:30 and 4am finds me slipping through the brush streamside.  There's enough time, and its prime time, to work some water before you head off to work.  This past week produced such an opportunity, despite the fact that early summer light is not here yet, and I grabbed it.

During the years I lived in Washington, I caught several steelhead before work.  There might be time to fish only a hole or two, but you could choose the cream of the stream and make casts to fish that had been unmolested all night before the day began with whatever it would bring.  What better way to start the day.  I'd snicker as I thought of folks busting a gut in a gym while I was peering through morning mist after breaking a sweat to get to the place of my choice.  And then, if it was a lucky day, oh the battle that would ensue.

I did the same thing while I lived in Texas and would be conducting my research work on the coastal marshes.  Before the work day began, I'd slip out knee-deep on a salt flat, shuffle for stingrays and watch for gators, and do battle with steelhead-sized redfish on topwater baits.

Before that I did the same thing on the Tuckaseegee River before class at Western Carolina University.  Where there's a will there's a way.  I'd dress for school, put the waders on over top, and time my extraction from the water so that I could peel the waders, fire up the truck, and make it to my desk - just in time.  Best way I could possibly prepare for an exam....

This particular morning found me slipping down below one of the handful of dams on the Missouri that is more or less on my way to town.  I didn't have much time, so I wouldn't be traveling any amount of river, just focusing on the plunge pool under the dam.  The water was high from recent snow melt.  The entire pool was an explosion of current and not its usual swirling 3-acre eddy.  I casted jigs to foam lines and behind current breaks, looking for fish to be holding up.  Early on I connected with one that took me for a short run and popped off.  Later I hooked a real drag-screamer that wound up sawing me off on some metal debris below the dam before I ever saw what it was.

I found one area that was fairly dead, basically the eye of the storm.  I thought forage of all sorts must be piling up in there and started flipping plastic jigs in hopes of maybe tagging an early morning walleye.  I started catching small trout. Several 8 to 10 inch fish.  Action, but not what I'd hoped.  Maybe I was catching the "forage."  Time was just about up now and I was trying to talk myself into leaving. There was a slab of ice that was creeping down the dam and growing out over the water in a slight overhang.  Water from above was running over it and dropping into the foam underneath.  The "eye of the storm" I'd been casting to had migrated toward this spot, as a swirling plunge pool will do, and I started launching jigs into a nice seam and foam line that had started to form between the two.  A cast or two in a nice solid fish slammed the jig on the first rip I'd given it as it started to sink, and off we went.  A little while later I brought it to the bank, raised it to my camera I'd set up behind me during the fight, and then slipped it back into the roaring river.  Time to go work, and the day was already an accomplishment.

Pirates

I spent last Saturday with my son jumping from spot to spot as we drove along the Missouri downstream of Holter Dam.  My wife and daughter were having a "girls' day" in Bozeman, so what better to do than hit a stream.  Mostly I just wanted to see what the pulse of the river was as the rainbow spawn gets underway and to get my son on the edge of some water.  He's not the fisherman I was at five years old, or at least thought I was, but he's not opposed to it either.  He doesn't last as long at it as I wish he would, but I'm patient and not pushing it.  The adventure eventually gave way to him climbing rocks, digging holes, and building a spent shotgun shell collection - as I continued to pick apart eddies and experiment.

He didn't catch any on this outing, but he was still living on the high of his last trip out when the weather broke and temps stayed above freezing long enough for me to take his little fingers near water.  On that day I'd plunked him down above an eddy that slammed into the bank at his feet and the depth dropped away instantly - meaning that all of his cast, no matter how poorly executed, would be in productive water.  I rigged him up with a nightcrawler on a pencil lead bait rig and cut him loose.  We only caught two fish that particular afternoon, but it was a father-son double to behold.  I had hooked a beauty of a 19-inch rainbow that was performing acrobatics and raking my line all over a boulder when he announced he too had one on.  His, a 22-inch rainbow, had picked his worm up while he'd been watching my fish do its thing.  My fight quickly turned to a haul as I worked as quick as a could to get my fish out of his way and focus on him.  We'd already determined we were keeping fish for the next day's dinner, so I essentially tossed mine to a pocket in the rocks and turned to help him.  I expected mine would likely flop back in the water, but I didn't much care.  By the time I was of any use to my son, he nearly had the fish to the bank.  It cooperated with him uncannily.  His little Batman kiddie pole is no fish fighter, and neither is he.  But my only involvement in the whole fight, other than to keep my fish as far away from his as possible, was to step in the water behind the fish and tail it onto the bank.  He'd managed to do the rest.  He now laughed and laughed as he watched me wrestle two powerful fish at once on a steep, rocky bank.  His was a fish I couldn't allow to be lost though.  I knew he was already envisioning fillets on his plate.  No five-year-old needs to be catching a 22-inch rainbow.  I was in college before I caught a trout that size. 


But, here on this current trip, the thought of the possibility of another monster waiting for him in that river didn't spur him on.  Like most any time my son is with me, we kept a couple fish.  A pair of bright rainbows above the 17-inch mark taken 40 miles apart.  In between we landed some nice browns.  We'd walk along rocky banks on the outside of river bends and watch the drift boats go by working the slacker water on the opposite side where rainbows were likely staging on the bars for the spring spawn.  In the pockets and eddies among the jumbled rock we'd flip and pitch jigs as if we were standing in the bow of a bass boat tossing to docks.  I landed one brown after he chased me to the bank and then turned away, only to fall victim to a quick drop of the rod tip and a figure eight maneuver. My son liked working the jigs among the rocks - I think he imagined the jigs on a grand pirate adventure along a rocky coastline.  But the next stop resulted in him spending 45 minutes collecting every single egg he could find where someone had previously landed a fish or spilled some bait.  Those eggs are still in a little box, dried to a crisp in the laundry room.  Some of that pirate's buried treasure I suppose.  The stop after that became a cliff-climbing endeavor, and the stop after that he unearthed a centipede and a few spiders and as he dug into the river bank.  I landed the best brown of the day at that spot and we admired it together before I returned the trout to the water and he returned to the centipede. I'm glad he was there.  I'll miss these days, but I look forward to when he mans the oars on the water while outfishing me too.  Although its probably the little sister we both need to watch out for....