One shot at Fall Browns

the big October brown I was looking for

In the middle of hunting season, its hard to take days that could spent in the woods and head to the water.  I've missed the bulk of fall's fabulous fishing for too many years.  I swore this year would be different, but so far I was wrong.  I had two November days penciled in on the calendar for fishing, and those were at the request of a friend to float some out-of-state family members of theirs down the Missouri for a weekend.  I really enjoy taking folks, especially now that I have a highly functional river boat, but that still wasn't going to be my time for pursuing the lunkers of fall.  Although we did catch a few good ones those two days.

But, the need to travel for work came to my rescue.  Turns out I'd be crossing over one of my absolute favorite rivers for browns as I headed to a few job sites.  It's a somewhat obscure river in terms of Montana fame, although by no means unknown, but I still hesitate to mention its name.  I set out for my field work early in the day, preserving the afternoon hours for the water.  After all, this was very likely going to be my only day in all of October to fish, and October was nearly gone.  I arrived with a couple hours of daylight remaining.  I started probing the depths of a large hole that's treated me well in the past with an 1/8th-ounce jig .  Pretty quickly I landed a nice brown.  Last time I'd fished this river in the heat of summer it had taken me a lot of hard work to locate a fish as nice as this first one.  But as time wore on, I wasn't finding them as quickly as I'd hoped.  I figured pre-spawners would be stacked in this hole, with good spawning riffles both above and below.  It seemed a slow-rolled jig bounced in front of their noses would be the ticket.  But as I reflected back on all my casts so far, it seemed that the follows, swipes, and hookups I was getting were on the retrieve, not the "jigging."  I swapped out for a sinking plug and went to

work with cross-stream casts, swinging the plug in streamer fashion, but with much more action and covering much more of the river.  The difference was immediate.  These fish were on the chase, and hookups picked up.  By dark I'd landed four or five browns in the 20 inch range, among other solid ones, and several pesky little rainbows.  I'd covered several hundred yards of river, and I'd driven to a new section once.  As darkness fell, I went back to my original hole.  I dressed a little more warmly and strapped on a headlamp.  I still had faith that this is where the some big ones were likely staged, and they'd probably be much more likely to cruise at night.  I landed two more good ones in the dark.  The second of the two and final fish of the evening was my best brown of 2014.  There was no moon.  It was black as it gets.  Casting relied entirely on knowing what was in front of me beforehand.  Working a lure is tough to do blindly.  Even the tiniest sliver of moon would have made a world of difference for targeting seams and structure.  Without having fished this hole in the daylight, I could have done nothing with it.  As it was, the majority of my casts were likely ineffective and passing over water I wouldn't have casted to if I could have seen. But I'd done what I'd set out to do - I had squeezed in some fishing time into a day that wouldn't normally have found me on the water.  I'd tied into a number of quality fall browns, and one of them was very near a personal best.  Maybe it was.  And all of them are back out there to be caught again - hopefully on a moonlit night or on some foam hoppers next summer.

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.

Looking back

Spring isn't technically over for a while yet, but I start thinking I'm fishing during spring long before it arrives. And now summer patterns are beginning to set in.  Spring 2014 has been a good one. Like last year about this time, I've hit 20 inches or better in four trout streams so far. Was awfully close in a fifth with a 19 incher, but can't claim it - yet. Also, folks who have joined me on excursions to rip

jigs or twitch plugs have collectively hit the 20 inch mark in that many streams as well - although I stand by myself in one river and have been bested in another, making the spread of streams that have produced big fish just a little wider than four.  Trout have made up the majority of my pursuit, but I've also connected with some nice northern pike in one river and some walleye on a couple streams. All that's really lacking in my river pursuits so far this spring by my usual standards is a good smallmouth trip.

Travel for work resulted in seeing new water, directly resulted in one of my 20-inchers, and indirectly resulted in one of my best browns of the year when making a subsequent return trip. A hefty 22 incher caught in a sudden thunderstorm. One of the keys this spring, like most any other spring in the West, has been finding fishable water. I played the weather right and hit a fabulous stretch of time in April when the weather was warming but stream flows were still at winter lows for just a couple days before discharge skyrocketed. I also leaned on tailwaters once the melt began to blow the freestone streams out, many of which remain unfishable. I've hit three primary tailwater streams so far (four if you count multiple dams on the same river), none of which have yet been the Bighorn.

Two rivers involved weekend or longer camping trips. One involved building a pickup rack to carry my jon boat and be able to tow the camper at the same time, which resulted in a couple days of floating productive water, holding and drifting under electric power rather than oars. Another river was fished just for the day, but involved 200 miles of one-way driving before and after. Left before dawn and got back after midnight. Such was the search for clear water. But each paid off big time in the scenery taken in, the family fun of camping, hanging out with friends, and the big fish that were encountered.

So far this spring I have fly fished very little. The focus of each of these trips has been probing the high water with jigs and using plugs as appropriate. I have fond memories of my dad sitting in his bass boat when I was a kid holding up some gargantuan lure on the end of his line that he had just tied on and predictably saying "only big fish need apply!" before tossing the offering out to whatever structure had prompted the switch. Jig and plug fishing is much the same - skip the fluff and go right to the big boys. And higher flows of spring beg for it. As I write this, flows are still mostly peaked, but the corner is turning, and already the hatches are thickening and trout are looking skyward. The surface feeding is picking up, wolf packs are forming on the Missouri, and my fingers are starting to itch for some fly line. Growing up a bass fisherman, there's nothing finer than the "toilet bowl flush" of a fish taking a surface bait. Trout tend to be a bit more dainty, but there's a piggishness in a hefty slurp that you can't deny.  Bring on hopper season!

I didn't always hit the weather right this spring - one wintertime trip found me in northern Montana on the water's edge in 6 degrees casting into a stiff wind. At least I can say I tried.... Another water on my list from that same trip was completely unfishable due to being frozen solid, except for where it plunged through the air and then disappeared under the shelf of ice covering the next pool. But another trip that started in the low teens turned out to be a day of bruiser trout. And other days went from sunburns to snow squalls. Spring is great - your wading boots might freeze to the rocks if you stand still too long, but you might also find yourself in a tee shirt soaking in the first warmth of the year.

There have also been a few heartbreakers among the hook-ups as well. The most prominent in my mind was a brown that ranks among the best I have ever personally seen on the end of a line. I was working a bank known to me to hold good browns. I'd already coaxed a number of solid fish from the stretch over a period of three or four trips spanning the first month of very high releases from Canyon Ferry on the Missouri. While others were focusing on the rainbow spawn, I was keying in on the little gold mine of browns I'd located. I'd

landed at least one above 20 inches from this shoreline each time I'd fished it. The last time I passed over it I was purposely standing high on the bank above it, flipping an eighth-ounce soft jerkbait-style jig along the immediately deep shoreline. The fish have been holding a rod's length or less from the bank, and my high position on the bank, easily 15 feet above the water on a near-vertical slope, gave both stealth and visibility. A long rod is key. I rolled the jig up from the depths and was darting it along the transition from visible bottom to deep green when a huge brown moved to intercept it. My mind didn't react, I took it as a matter of course. My heart
didn't race yet, and I watched the fish take the lure, thrash it like a lion with a gazelle, and then turn to mosey back where it had come from. Mechanically I went to set the hook at just the right position in his turn, but my fingers had failed to take in the slack I'd given the fish to "make his kill". The mistake meant that the hookset was made on a slack line and when the line came tight on the fish the break was instant. The brown started doing somersaults trying to toss the lure. Even before I accepted that I had broken the line, I was watching the fish fight as if he were still attached and briefly tried to convince myself there might just be more slack to gain.

But I knew what I'd done and could only watch the show beneath me as the fish rolled around in the
shallow water against the bank. It even paused for a while and held in the current in plain sight, as if taking up a new feeding lane, before it slipped back to deeper water.  I even had plenty of time to call out to my partner and say "I wish you were over here to see this." What might be trout of the year was just dancing around, and I had the time to describe out loud what I was watching before the fish went out of sight. Wish I'd thought to pull out the camera and snap a picture....

Spring (crazy) fun

April in Montana.  Everybody gets excited when it hits 60 degrees, but nobody puts their jackets away.  Parts of the state saw 70 degrees last week, but Saturday on the river found me knee-deep in water squinting through the snowflakes stinging my eyes.  It was a brutal day weather-wise.  It was 40 at dawn, the high for the day.  Not bad really, but it was windy, rainy, and snowy all day.  By the time I got back to the truck ten hours later it was hovering just above 30. Most every part of me was numb, but well worth it (although a few folks have been known to call me crazy).  These can be the best days.  The action might not always be hot, but the fish are quality.  Big rainbows are stirring as spawning urges them out of the depths.  Higher water flows get the browns motivated to cruise the eddies and stake out ambush points.  Sometimes the action is only limited by the fisherman's ability to function in the frigid, ever-changing conditions.  I like days like Saturday.  Only the serious folks are out, but the fishing is unaffected by the time of day.  On the Missouri, if it weren't for the tailwater aspect, there'd be no fishing right now.  The upper river is blown out by snowmelt.  In response, the lower river is flowing at rates double its typical stage, but the water remains clear.  Streamside trails and access points are drowned under a couple feet of water.  Wading remains essential for getting around obstacles and stepping out onto the occasional strategic boulder, although wade-fishing is mostly not an option.

I tackled Saturday's conditions with two spinning rods, each spooled with 4lb line.  I keep one holstered behind my back in my Badlands Black Jack waist pack while fishing the other. The pack is not built as a fishing pack, but I find it to be nearly perfectly suited to it.  My 9.5ft G. Loomis Bronzeback was rigged all day with various jigs.  I will always fish the lightest jig I can get away with, and on Saturday this was no less than an 1/8th ounce.  My 6.5ft Crossfire was rigged with various plugs and crankbaits, although I did take a few fish on Zig Jigs with it as well.  I switched between rods as the water dictated.  Big sweeping holes and runs found a #7 or #9 Rapala Countdown swinging through them.  Boulder pockets and distinct seams found jigs bouncing their way along their boundaries.  For the first half of the day I caught only rainbows.  The very first fish turned out to the biggest - a beautiful rainbow exceeding 26 inches that was around 8 pounds, although I'll admit I forgot to weigh it.  I

caught several other solid rainbows throughout the morning and into the afternoon.  Many on plugs, but most on jigs.

By about 2 o'clock I came to a particularly rocky shoreline framed by high bluffs.  Anyone who knows browns knows that they are likely to be caught anywhere, but they also know that quite often browns orient off a particular structure or stretch of water.  Especially if their population isn't the dominant fish in the stream - then they really tend to just occupy whatever their favorite parts of water are, much like a bass.  When you find these spots, you can often return to them time and again and expect the same results.  The same is true of smallmouth bass in rivers -once you've identified a piece of water that holds them, you can almost always find them there.

This rocky stretch was on the outside of a bend, and the swollen river was slamming into this bank.  An astute observer of my photos once pointed out to me that I often fish steep rocky edges.  It's true, even in smaller streams.  Often at the point where a fisherman typically crosses over to fish from the inside of the bend, I stay on the outside, and precariously pick my way along the edges, thoroughly working the deep pockets that are nearly impossible to keep a lure or fly in from the other side.  I do the same thing when steelhead fishing.  Poise yourself over the water in the best way possible for keeping your lure or bait in place the longest.  Casting over the current from the "convenient" side often means that your presentation will fall out of the productive holding water sooner than it should have.  Once you've hooked up, finding a place to land your catch can be the real adventure - but at least you hooked up!  My big rainbow to start the day was in just such a spot.  I descended steep rocks just to reach one eddy.  The result was a photo op that looked more like I was posing with a Coho salmon than a Montana rainbow.

My first brown was laughable.  I was tending to a nest in my reel (something not all that unusual when winding on near-tensionless jig retrieves cast after cast). My jig dangled on a rod's length of line in a few feet of water, just off the bank.  The nest of line was pulled from my fingers and up to the first eyelet as a nice little brown grabbed the jig that I must have been dangling on his nose.  I stripped it back in like a fly line and fought the fish for only a few seconds before it flopped off.  Funny, but it got me thinking as I entered that stretch of rocky bank. Turns out the browns were all holding tight to the bank on the outside of this bend.  Some were sitting on what would normally be dry ground, others were deep against the sides of vertical rock faces, but each one was an arm's length off the bank.  The second was a small one.  The third was a savage individual that slashed my jig as I raised it from the water, like a largemouth inhaling a Zara Spook.  He was a girthy fish with a lot of length, and was sitting in very shallow water over rocks that would normally be a part of the trail.  I could see the crooked lower jaw clearly on each of the next two attempts to take a bait.  I

switched lures between each cast, always giving him something different to look at.  I don't know why I was unable to connect with such an aggressive fish, but it wasn't to be, and I moved on.  I had a few chasers and a few followers, each one a brown.  By the end of the rocky stretch I'd landed only half a dozen, but two were fish exceeding 20 inches.  Both nailed a Zoom Tiny Fluke in Arkansas Shiner fished on an 1/8th ounce jig head.  A couple other smaller ones came on 1/8th ounce Glass Minnows from Kit's Tackle, also sporting a Tiny Fluke on the shank.  Unfortunately my camera batteries, including my spares, died.  I guess they'd been through too many freezings and thawings on my recent trips to the river.  I took a couple mediocre cell phone shots on an outstretched arm and one segment of video.  Normally I reach back behind me and set up a camera attached to a small tripod to capture a self portrait as I raise the fish out of the water for a pic.  It still pains me to think of the fish I released that afternoon without a decent picture.  By the time I reached the end of the rocky stretch and the river was straightening out again, I knew I was nearing the time to hike out.  But, still casting the Tiny Fluke up against the bank on a straight downstream presentation, the river had one more pig to part with before I left.  My last fish of the day was a beast of a rainbow that went 6.5 pounds on my pocket scale.  Both my first and last fish of the day were trophy rainbows.  I'll take that.  And I was more than happy to start walking the distance back to where I'd parked to try and get my body temperature back up to human levels.  My wife and I went to dinner with some friends that evening.  After hearing a few details of my long cold day in the pursuit of fish, the lady of the couple across the table quite witfully said, "This isn't the dinner date you think it its, this is an intervention."

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....

An Introduction

I'm becoming a bit of a jig fisherman. Jigs have always been a mainstay in my arsenal from largemouth bass to saltwater, but lately jig fishing has taken more of a grip on me as I have been catching trophy trout with them almost everywhere I go across Montana - from famous to obscure water. Living in Montana, first in Billings and now in Helena, has been the first time since 2002 that I've been back in my river element. I grew up in the Southern Appalachians of North Carolina, immersed in streams of all sizes where trout and smallmouth bass were my bread and butter.  College was largely a means to fish, and Western Carolina University, 35 miles from home, provided an excellent launching pad.  Graduation took me to Texas for a bit more school.  I wound up in a graduate project on a coastal marsh where I spent all spare time on the salt flats chasing redfish, trout, flounder, and wild hogs.  A first job took me to Washington State where I learned the art of drifting for steelhead in small streams and focused on little else for six years (thanks Joe Gardner!).

But, I am completely in my element on a trout stream or smallmouth river, and its nice to be back in my sweet spot.  I've been living in Montana now going on three years and am drinking in all there is in the outdoors that appeals to me - from the elk woods to the badlands - and of course, fish.  My work, centered around gravel mines, takes me all over the state.  I see waters of all sorts, and I always travel with fishing gear. Anywhere there's a road there's a gravel mine, and those roads often lead to places - and waters - the tourist rarely sees. Sometimes it's in my travels for work, sometimes it's on a return trip or new adventure with my family, but I seek out waters that appeal to my insatiable desire to find big fish.  "Big" is of course relative to the water and the species.  I'll jump up and down over a 12-inch brookie in a Smoky Mountain stream same as I will over Pacific Northwest salmon.

If fisherman have a portfolio, my Montana section includes smallmouth from places like the Tongue and Yellowstone Rivers to Fort Peck Lake, northern pike from Fort Peck to the Milk and Marias Rivers, walleye from the Missouri to tiny central prairie streams, largemouth in eastern Montana irrigation systems, lake trout in the last Montana tailwater section of the Missouri before North Dakota, incidental catfish that picked up a jig where a big brown should have been, and, of course, trout.  Trout everywhere - from eastern waters that have never found their names in print associated with trout, to big famous tailwaters like the Bighorn and Missouri, to nearly muddy prairie streams, to the gorgeous blue ribbon streams across the mountain region of the west.  And in nearly all those waters, jigs have taken trout of awesome proportions.  In spring of 2013 alone jigs accounted for fish of 20 inches or better in at least five Montana streams.  2014, as cold and snowy as its been so far, has already seen more than a dozen in that size class, several of which were more appropriately measured in pounds than inches.  Fly gear has its place, and there are many times that there's nothing I'd rather do than fly fish. But jigs are awfully effective.  And any 'cracks' jigs leave in the water column, plugs fill in nicely.  Together they thoroughly fish all water below the surface, water you often could barely hope to skim with regular fly gear - and to me, if I have to convert my fly gear into heavy, bottom-seeking tackle, I'd rather trade it in for the spinning rod.  I won't force my fly rod to do what my spinning rod could do better, and I won't ask my spinning rod to do what my fly rod excels at.  I will save my discussion on "purism" in one form or another for another time... 

Lately I have been spending my time on the big waters of the Missouri with my nine-and-half-foot spinning rod in hand - a G. Loomis from their bronzeback series.  It's the rod I spent those years drifting for steelhead with, and it is well suited to taking large fish on a light line.  It also does a phenomenal job of presenting a light jig in big water, allowing line to be lifted above current and even mended as you would a fly line.  The presentation may look more like a live bait or nymph drift (dare I lump those two together), but its peppered with jerks and pops that bring the jig to life.  Its an intuition that connects you with the river bottom, swimming your jig through the world you can't see.  If you snag, you're in the right place.  If you get to the right place and don't snag, you're doing it right.

When Brandon Henson, a Pisgah High School classmate and very accomplished banjo player, dropped in on me last summer, I lamented to him that fiddle playing hadn't stuck with me all those years ago in North Carolina where I took lessons as a kid.  This lament came as we were catching cutthroats with dry flies on a picturesque southwest Montana stream. Rather, while I was catching and doing my darndest to get him to connect with more. He pointed out very eloquently that I was making my music right then. I kind of liked that. And it was true. I do make my equivalent of his music on flowing water rather than a set of strings.